VATICAN CITY (RNS)– In a brand-new file on human self-respect provided Monday (April 8), the Vatican’s department that guides Catholic teaching enhanced the church’s opposition to abortion, surrogacy, gender theory and any effort to alter one’s sex.
“Desiring an individual self-determination, as gender theory recommends, apart from this essential fact that human life is a present, totals up to a concession to the olden temptation to make oneself God,” the file states.
Gender theory, the file stated, “means to reject the best possible distinction that exists in between living beings: sexual distinction.” It likewise specified that “all efforts to unknown recommendation to the ineliminable sexual distinction in between males and female are to be declined.”
The statement, entitled “Dignitas Infinita,” or “Infinite Dignity,” has actually remained in the works at the Vatican for 5 years and went through numerous drafts and versions before the last file was accepted by the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith and by Pope Francis, whose approval provides it the weight of main teaching.
The title of the file is drawn from a speech provided by Pope John Paul II to a group of handicapped people in Germany in 1980, and the file itself was signed by Francis on the 19th anniversary of John Paul’s death, on April 2.
After a long description of the church’s understanding of what it calls the “inalienable and intrinsic” self-respect of each human, which it stated exists from the start of human presence and can not be withdrawed, the file rapidly evaluates problems challenging human self-respect today.
The statement asserts that sex-change surgical treatment, likewise referred to as gender-affirming surgical treatment, “threats threatening the special self-respect the individual has actually gotten from the minute of conception.”
It likewise states that the church “takes a stand versus the practice of surrogacy,” when a female brings a kid for another individual, “through which the tremendously worthwhile kid ends up being a simple things.” Kids “deserve to have a completely human (and not synthetically caused) origin,” the file specified, including that “the genuine desire to have a kid can not be changed into a ‘ideal to a kid’ that stops working to appreciate the self-respect of that kid as the recipient of the present of life.”
The file likewise highlighted the church’s opposition to abortion and euthanasia, while likewise worrying the value of protecting the intrinsic self-respect of individuals coping with specials needs, the senior and those living at the margins of society, specifically the bad.
It similarly condemned wars and policies that leave people denied of human self-respect.
The declaration’s positions are ones the church has actually long held which Francis has actually typically validated. Francis has actually described gender theory as “a kind of ideological colonization” that tries to remove crucial distinctions in human beings, and he has actually excoriated its principles as Western propaganda. The pope has actually called surrogacy “despicable” and harming for females, particularly those residing in hardship, and Vatican agents at the United Nations have actually required an international restriction of the practice.
