Vatican says transgenderism, surrogacy, gender theory violate human dignity

The Vatican has released a document criticizing gender theory, transgender surgery, and surrogacy as affronts to human dignity.

Dignitas Infinita, Latin for "Infinite Dignity," was released on Monday after more than five years in development by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and focuses on threats to human dignity in the modern world.

"In the light of Revelation, the Church resolutely reiterates and confirms the ontological dignity of the human person, created in the image and likeness of God and redeemed in Jesus Christ," the document states in its beginning.

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Dignitas Infinita addresses dozens of individual issues of the modern day through the lens of scripture and church teaching, including abortion, human trafficking, poverty, euthanasia and more.

Notably, the document formally reaffirms and expands on the Catholic Church's teaching regarding gender theory, which it holds as an inadmissible ideology.

"Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God," the document states. "This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel."

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It continues, "Another prominent aspect of gender theory is that it intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference. This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them. In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvelous of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world."

The document reaffirms the Church's teachings on abortion, and also expands its criticisms of surrogate pregnancies, which it says are contrary to the pro-life position.

"The Church also takes a stand against the practice of surrogacy, through which the immensely worthy child becomes a mere object," the document states.

"First and foremost, the practice of surrogacy violates the dignity of the child. Indeed, every child possesses an intangible dignity that is clearly expressed — albeit in a unique and differentiated way — at every stage of his or her life: from the moment of conception, at birth, growing up as a boy or girl, and becoming an adult," the dicastery wrote in the document. "Because of this unalienable dignity, the child has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the giver and that of the receiver."

It continued, "Moreover, acknowledging the dignity of the human person also entails recognizing every dimension of the dignity of the conjugal union and of human procreation. Considering this, the legitimate desire to have a child cannot be transformed into a 'right to a child' that fails to respect the dignity of that child as the recipient of the gift of life."

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