Four conclusions from the Vatican document on human dignity

ROME – The document published Monday by the Vatican places human dignity at the center of Catholic life, but, in doing so, addresses some of the most pressing social issues. difficult and sensitivethose that Pope francesco he avoided during his pontificate.

However, on Monday, his church relied heavily on them in the document titled “Infinite dignity”.

He argued that the exploitation of the poor, marginalized and vulnerable This was an erosion of human dignity.

But it was the reaffirmation of the Church’s rejection Abortion, death penalty and euthanasiato, and above all the gender fluidity, transition surgery and surrogacywhich church liberals feared could be used as ammunition by the right.

Here are four takeaways.

The Pope’s inclusion has limits.

Francis’ inclusive message, which included allowing Catholics LGBTQ+ receiving blessings from priests and transgender people to be baptized and act as godparents, there is a limit:

THE doctrine Catholic.

The pope’s conservative critics 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 message wrong signal.

But the document published on Monday and the statements of Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Vatican dicastery in charge of supervising the doctrine, underline that it is precisely this:

a sign to open to the world a Church that maintained itself “REAL“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 statement that They wouldn’t get what they wanted.

As if to underline 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 the problem might be terminology. not the meaning.

This 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 “mystery“of childbirth.

Gender fluidity undermines human dignity, the document states.

The Vatican argues that gender fluidity, or the idea that people can decide their sex, undermines 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 advocacy groups are pushing what the Vatican calls “gender theory” as a way of “cultural colonization”in more traditional societies.

This ideology, states the Vatican in the document released on Monday, “envisages a society without sexual differences, eliminating them anthropological basis of the family”.

It is unacceptable, the Vatican said, that such ideologies manage to “establish themselves as absolute and indisputable, even dictating how children should be raised.”

The Vatican links surrogacy to commercialization.

The Vatican document reiterates its opposition to surrogacy, arguing that while the process may satisfy the wishes of couples wishing to have children, it does so at the expense of broader human dignity because it reduces women, according to the Vatican, to simple vectors. and the children, those whom Francisco defined as products of “marketing”.

The church’s opposition to surrogacy e 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”, reads the document.

«Surrogacy also violates the dignity of the woman, whether she is forced to do so or whether she freely chooses to submit to it», since it separates the woman «from the child that grows inside her and becomes mere subordinate means to gain or arbitrary desire.” of others.”

The sex a person is born with is considered a gift from God.

The Vatican document is firm in its rejection of transition surgeries, what it calls “sex change.”

It argues that the physical sex with which a person is born (male or female) is an equal gift from God, who created the human being in his image.

It is not a gift that can be returned, says the Vatican.

Changing sex, the Church maintains, means putting individualism before “the need to respect the natural order of the human person” and “any sex change intervention, in general, 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 anomalies which are already evident at birth or which develop later”, which could be resolved through “health professionals” because “it would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here”.

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