From a pope who has made outreach to the LGBTQ+ community a hallmark of his papacy, the document was a setback for trans Catholics.
The prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, presents the declaration ‘Dignitas Infinita’ during a press conference at the Vatican, Monday, April 8, 2024. The Vatican on Monday declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave violations of human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that reject God’s plan for human life.
“It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document said. The document’s existence, rumored since 2019, was confirmed in recent weeks by the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, a close Francis confidant.
Fernández said he hoped the new document would be as talked-about as much as the one on gay blessings, which he claimed had been viewed 7 billion times online. While much attention about surrogacy has focused on possible exploitation of poor women as surrogates, the Vatican document asserts that the child “has the right to have a fully human origin and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the giver and that of the receiver.”
In a news conference to introduce the document, Fernández acknowledged that the “intrinsically disordered” language was very strong. He suggested there might be a better way, “with other words,” to express the church’s vision of sex between husband and wife to create new life.
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