Vatican labels gender-affirming surgery grave threat to human dignity

The Vatican labeled gender-affirming surgeries as a grave threat to human dignity Monday, on par with abortion, war, human trafficking and violence against women.

The highly anticipated document, called the “Infinite Dignity,” embraced a more conservative approach to the hot-button issue, after a series of declarations by Pope Francis embraced more liberal positions.

The document cited Francis’s teaching of “the need to respect the natural order of the human person,” and the need to “protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.”

“It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document reads.

The document noted that this declaration did not apply to people born with “gender abnormalities” who later opt to receive surgery.

The Vatican included a section of the document labeling surrogacy as one of the “grave violations of human dignity.”

The document said surrogacy turns a child into “a mere object” and condemned the practice as “deplorable” and one that “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs,” adding, “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”

While the declaration was in the works for five years and was widely anticipated, the document marks a dramatic pivot for Francis, whose papacy has been marked by his efforts to include LGBTQ Catholics.

Francis has sent mixed signals on his approach to LGBTQ Catholics in recent months.  A Vatican document made public in November 2023 made clear trans people could be baptized, be witnesses at church weddings and serve as godparents.

Earlier this month, however, he came under some criticism for referring to “gender ideology” as an “ugly ideology of our time.”

New Ways Ministry, which describes itself as a “Catholic outreach” that advocates for LGBTQ equity and inclusion, blasted the new document in a statement Monday.

Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, said the document “fails terribly by offering transgender and nonbinary people not infinite, but limited human dignity. While it lays out a wonderful rationale for why each human being, regardless of condition in life, must be respected, honored, and loved, it does not apply this principle to gender-diverse people.”