On Monday, the Vatican clarified its stance on surrogacy, gender surgery and gender theory indicating that all three are “violations of human dignity.” The Vatican’s doctrine office released a 20-page declaration titled “Infinite Dignity” that was approved by Pope Francis on March 25 and announced Monday.
The document contains the Vatican’s official stances on a number of issues and brings in biblical as well as just moral principle reasoning.
In addressing some of the many grave violations of human dignity today, we can draw upon the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, which emphasized that “all offenses against life itself, such as murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, and willful suicide” must be recognized as contrary to human dignity. Furthermore, the Council affirmed that “all violations of the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture, undue psychological pressures,” also infringe upon our dignity.
Specifically, regarding surrogacy, The Church insists that it “takes a stand against the practice of surrogacy.”
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. 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. 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.
The document claims that surrogacy also violates the dignity of the woman who is carrying someone else's child as she becomes “detached from the child growing inside her” and is merely the vessel to help others reach “gain or desire.”
Oddly enough, the document didn’t mention the Bible, Christ or God in its reasoning against surrogacy - when surrogacy, in and of itself, is an attempt to play God and artificially create life.
When it came to gender theory, the Church insisted that “biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated” and therefore hedged against any attempts to be something other than what you actually are.
This principle carried into the next section regarding sex change where the document insisted that any sex change, or attempts to do so, “risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”
These positions aren’t new for the church, but the rise in the popularity of these issues is however, hence the official statement. Let’s hope this redirects and keeps people on the track of sanity!
