A person’s gender is a “gift from God” and those considering gender reassignment should respect their bodies as they have been created, a Vatican policy document approved by Pope Francis has stated.
The 20-page declaration published on Monday issued staunch criticism of the progressive gender theory dominating Western society, denouncing gender-affirming surgery and modern-day gender ideology as a violation of human dignity and “deeply harmful.”
According to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department responsible for outlining the religious discipline of the Catholic Church, the attempts to introduce new rights in relation to gender theory in recent years have “led to instances of ideological colonization,” which the Church regards as “extremely dangerous.”
“Human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God. This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel,” the document states.
Promoting rights for individuals to self-identify as any gender they wish rather than embracing the gender given to them by God denies “the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference,” the Church warns, adding that progressive gender theory “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”
The document dismissed the notion that a man can ever truly become a woman, and vice versa, claiming it is impossible to “separate the masculine and the feminine from God’s work of creation, which is prior to all our decisions and experiences, and where biological elements exist which are impossible to ignore.”
Instead, the Church urged people to acknowledge and accept the difference between genders so that “each person can fully discover themselves, their dignity, and their identity.”
Unsurprisingly, the Holy See offered a dim view of sex changes, claiming that they, “as a rule, risk threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”
“Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created,” Pope Francis added.
Earlier this month ahead of the document’s publication, Pope Francis outlined his critical view of gender theory, telling participants of a two-day conference in the Vatican it was an “ugly ideology of our times which cancels out the differences [in humanity] and makes everything the same.”
