The Vatican on Monday issued a declaration, “Dignitas Infinita,” on human dignity, warning that the practice of surrogacy, transgender surgeries, and gender theory are contrary to human dignity.
“In the face of so many violations of human dignity that seriously threaten the future of the human family, the Church encourages the promotion of the dignity of every human person, regardless of their physical, mental, cultural, social, and religious characteristics,” the document says. “The Church does this with hope, confident of the power that flows from the Risen Christ, who has fully revealed the integral dignity of every man and woman.”
The name of the document translates to “Infinite Dignity,” and it’s a five-year-long product of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith that reaffirms Catholic Church teaching on the topics. It addresses a number of weighty topics that have entered the political sphere, including surrogacy.
“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,” it continues. “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.
“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,” the document adds.
It also addresses “critical issues present in gender theory,” warning 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,” the Vatican document says. “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.”
As for attempted sex-change operations, “Dignitas Infinita” emphasizes that the “dignity of the body cannot be considered inferior to that of the person as such.” It quotes the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that “the human body shares in the dignity of ‘the image of God.’”
“Any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document states. “This is not to exclude the possibility that a person with genital abnormalities that are already evident at birth or that develop later may choose to receive the assistance of health care professionals to resolve these abnormalities. However, in this case, such a medical procedure would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here.”