CNN Central News & Network–ITDC India Epress/ITDC News Bhopal: The Vatican on Monday declared sex change operations and surrogacy as grave threats to human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that violate God’s plan for human life.
The Vatican’s doctrine office issued Infinite Dignity, a 20-page declaration that has been in the works for five years. After substantial revision in recent months, it was approved March 25 by Pope Francis, who ordered its publication.
In its most eagerly anticipated section, the Vatican repeated its rejection of gender theory or the idea that one’s gender can be changed. It said God created man and woman as biologically different, separate beings, and said they must not tinker with that plan or try to “make oneself God.
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.
It distinguished between transitioning surgeries, which it rejected, and genital abnormalities that are present at birth or that develop later. Those abnormalities can be resolved with the help of health care professionals, it said.
The document’s existence, rumoured since 2019, was confirmed in recent weeks by the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Argentine Cardinal Vctor Manuel Fernndez, a close Pope Francis confidante.
He had cast it as something of a nod to conservatives after he authored a more explosive document approving blessings for same-sex couples that sparked criticism from conservative bishops around the world, especially in Africa.
And while rejecting gender theory, the document takes pointed aim at countries including many in Africa that criminalise homosexuality. It echoed Francis’ assertion in a 2023 interview with The Associated Press that being homosexual is not a crime making the assertion now part of the Vatican’s doctrinal teaching.
The new document denounces as contrary to human dignity the fact that, in some places, not a few people are imprisoned, tortured, and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation.