Vatican says sex change procedures threaten 'dignity,' rejects gender theory

The Vatican on Monday released a doctrine on "Human Dignity," which reinforced traditional Catholic beliefs on sex, gender, abortion, surrogacy and other topics while rejecting progressive ideology. 

The 66-paragraph declaration has been in the works for more than five years. Pope Francis, after overseeing revisions in recent months, approved the doctrine and ordered its publication late last month.

"Every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter," the doctrine opens. 

While Pope Francis has spoken against gender theory before, the declaration issues a particularly harsh rebuke of the ideology, deeming it "extremely dangerous since it cancels differences in its claim to make everyone equal."

The Catholic Church doctrine stresses the sexual differences between men and women and being made in "the image of God," stating: "It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception." However, the doctrine notes that there are rare cases of  people born with genital abnormalities or who develop them later, and in those cases, if they have surgery to resolve such features it would not be considered a sex change. 

The church also said there is a need to defend unborn life and take "a stand against the practice of surrogacy, through which the immensely worthy child becomes a mere object," per the doctrine. Surrogacy violates the dignity of both a child and the woman, since it detaches the mother from the fetus she is carrying, the church said.

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