ROME – The document issued Monday by the Vatican places human dignity at the center of Catholic life, but in doing so, it addresses some of the most pressing social issues. difficult and sensitive those that Pope Francisco has avoided during his papacy.
However, on Monday, his church leaned heavily on them in the document called “Infinite Dignity”.
He argued that the exploitation of the poor, marginalized and vulnerable It amounted to an erosion of human dignity.
But it was the reaffirmation of the Church’s rejection of abortion, the death penalty and euthanasia a, and especially the gender fluidity, transition surgery and surrogacy which Church liberals worried would be used as ammunition by the right.
The inclusion of the Pope has limits.
Francis’s inclusive message, which has included allowing Catholics LGBTQ+ receive blessings from priests and transgender people to be baptized and act as godparents, there is a limit:
Conservative critics of the pope have argued for a decade that his tendency to speak spontaneously and overly welcomingly toward LGBTQ+ people, the divorced and remarried, along with others who sin in the eyes of the Church, had sent a wrong signal.
But the document published on Monday and the statements of Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Vatican department in charge of supervising the doctrine, stressed that it was just that:
a sign to open to the world a church that maintained its same “TRUE” immutable. ”
However, that dissonance between Francis’ style and his defense of Catholic doctrine was highlighted in the document, and for many supporters of major changes within the church, it amounted to a declaration that They wouldn’t get what they wanted.
As if to highlight that tension, Fernández responded Monday to a question about the church’s teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” (what many supporters of the LGBTQ+ faithful consider the insurmountable obstacle for true acceptance) saying that the problem may be terminology. not the meaning.
It is, he said, a “very strong expression” and that perhaps “more appropriate words” could be found to express the idea that homosexual sex cannot produce the “mystery” of childbirth.
Gender fluidity erodes human dignity, the document says.
The Vatican maintains that gender fluidity, or the idea that people can decide their own sex, erodes human dignity because it erases the difference between men and women, which it considers a gift from God.
Francisco, while welcoming personally transgender people (he has met many during his papacy), he is convinced that powerful pressure groups are pushing what the Vatican calls “gender theory” as a way of “cultural colonization” in the most traditionalist societies.
This ideology, the Vatican stated in the document issued on Monday, “envisions a society without sexual differences, thus eliminating anthropological basis of the family”.
It was unacceptable, the Vatican said, that such ideologies managed to “affirm themselves as absolute and unquestionable, even dictating how children should be raised.”
The Vatican links surrogacy with commercialization.
The Vatican document reiterates its opposition to surrogacy, arguing that while the process may satisfy the wishes of couples who wish to have children, it does so at the cost of broader human dignity because it reduces women, in the Vatican’s view, to simple carriers. and children, what Francisco has called products of “commercialization”.
The church’s opposition to surrogacy and in vitro fertilization It arises from his ethical and theological teachings on the question of life.
Although Francis has made it clear that although the Church opposes surrogacy, children born from said pregnancy They can be baptized.
“First of all, the practice of surrogacy violates the dignity of the child,” who “has the right to have a fully human origin (and not artificially induced) and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the donor and that of the recipient,” the document states.
“Surrogacy also violates the dignity of the woman, whether she is forced to do so or freely chooses to submit to it,” since it separates the woman “from the child who grows in her and becomes a mere subordinate medium to arbitrary gain or desire.” of others.”
The sex with which a person is born is considered a gift from God.
The Vatican document is firm in its rejection of transition surgeries, what it calls “sex change.”
It maintains that the physical sex with which a person is born (male or female) is an equal gift from God, who has made human beings in his image.
It’s not a gift you can return, says the Vatican.
Changing sex, the church maintains, is putting individualism before “the need to respect the natural order of the human person” and “any sex change intervention, as a general rule, runs the risk of threatening the unique dignity that the person has received from the moment of conception.”
The church, however, made an exception for people with “genital abnormalities that are already evident at birth or that develop later”, which could be resolved through “health professionals” because “it would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here.” .”
