To anyone who has truly paid attention to the Vatican and to Pope Francis in perticular, the message from Dignitas Infinita could not possibly have come as a surprise. And to those who have pushed back hard against the transgender activists and their social panic, it could not have come too soon.
Regardless of whatever else thinks of Pope Francis on various issues, he has remained firm on transgender ideology, although mainly through statements and homilies. In Dignitas Infinita (“Infinite Dignity”), the pontiff has formally declared the idea that gender feelings transcend biology and reality unacceptable. While exhorting the Church to treat people with gender confusion with love and respect, Francis all but declares gender theory a heresy.
Pope Francis’ encyclical covers a number of topics in the framework of human dignity, in arguments developed over a five-year period in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It covers topics about “grave violations of human dignity” sucg as poverty, war, human trafficking, and abortion and surrogacy, which will no doubt create some waves of its own. Much of these are already well-known and fully documented positions of the Catholic Church.
The pontiff saves gender theory and sex change almost to the end, save for two paragraphs on “digital violence” — pornography, cyberbullying, gambling, and so on. The five paragraphs on gender theory starts with a repeated call for respect for all human beings regardless of sexual orientation, and then goes into the specific and categorical rejection of “gender theory,” especially in paragraphs 57-59:
57. Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that 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.
This is precisely the impulse behind gender theory, especially in its efforts to claim that gender is emotional rather than biological. It is not different from the Marxist idea that human economic systems can create the New Communist Man through brute force, an idea that has somehow flourished despite its utter failure over more than a century — and tens of millions of deaths in the effort. Gender theory operates from the same impulse as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: the temptation to become gods themselves and to reorder creation to suit their own impulses.
Pope Francis continues, emphasis mine:
58. Another prominent aspect of gender theory is that it intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference. This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them. In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvelous of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world.
59. In this sense, respect for both one’s own body and that of others is crucial in light of the proliferation of claims to new rights advanced by gender theory. This ideology “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”[103] It thus becomes unacceptable that “some ideologies of this sort, which seek to respond to what are at times understandable aspirations, manage to assert themselves as absolute and unquestionable, even dictating how children should be raised. It needs to be emphasized that ‘biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated.’”[104] Therefore, all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected: “We cannot 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.”[105] Only by acknowledging and accepting this difference in reciprocity can each person fully discover themselves, their dignity, and their identity.
When we assert ourselves as gods over nature and objective reality, it follows that we will brook no dissent from our edicts. The Pope also lands on a key element of gender ideology: a rebellion against the nuclear family. The Marxists also attempted to destroy the family in a number of ways; indoctrination and/or removal of children, limiting the procreative freedom of families, and sometimes just simply murder and sterilization. The State was the family; it was not for nothing that Orwell used the term “Big Brother” in 1984, and explained it explicitly as a replacement for the normal human family.
Today, those who wish to destroy the family are using sterilization again, only this time aimed at children under the Orwellian term “gender-affirming care.” Pope Francis addresses sex change ‘therapies’ as an assault on the dignity of humans in their reproductive potential, and an attack on the unified body and soul of each human being. Again, emphasis mine:
60. The dignity of the body cannot be considered inferior to that of the person as such. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expressly invites us to recognize that “the human body shares in the dignity of ‘the image of God.’”[106] Such a truth deserves to be remembered, especially when it comes to sex change, for humans are inseparably composed of both body and soul. In this, the body serves as the living context in which the interiority of the soul unfolds and manifests itself, as it does also through the network of human relationships. Constituting the person’s being, the soul and the body both participate in the dignity that characterizes every human.[107] Moreover, the body participates in that dignity as it is endowed with personal meanings, particularly in its sexed condition.[108] It is in the body that each person recognizes himself or herself as generated by others, and it is through their bodies that men and women can establish a loving relationship capable of generating other persons. Teaching about the need to respect the natural order of the human person, Pope Francis affirmed that “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.”[109] It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception. This is not to exclude the possibility that a person with genital abnormalities that are already evident at birth or that develop later may choose to receive the assistance of healthcare professionals to resolve these abnormalities. However, in this case, such a medical procedure would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here.
It is in this passage that Francis comes close to calling gender theory and sex changes a heretical belief system. Manichaeism, one of the ancient heresies of the Church, taught that only the spiritual world was good and that all materiality was inherently evil. (Other related heresies, particularly some Gnostics, taught the same thing.) While Manichaeism died centuries ago, that idea has had a seductive pull on people of faith. It leads us to derogate our physical world, including our own bodies, as a hindrance to transcendence of the spiritual. In that sense, the mutilation of bodies to achieve some sort of salvific status almost makes sense, but it is entirely narcissistic. It rejects any kind of creator God and places our self-regard as the center of the moral universe.
What impact will this declaration have? To a large and ironic extent, it depends on how much outrage it will generate, especially in the Western media. None of this represents any kind of change in position for the Catholic Church (not even the passages on euthanasia and assisted suicide), but that doesn’t guarantee against an angry and contextless attack on Francis’ argument. Having reported from the 2015 Synod on the Family and watched the mainstream media reporting on those discussions, there is plenty of room for misinterpretation and hysterical overreaction. Or, alternately, the media might largely ignore it as a dog-bites-man story.
However, we should not ignore it. This is a brief but powerful declaration of the dignity of all humans as complete beings, body and soul, and an important pushback against those who try to manipulate them for their own ideological agendas. Later today, I’ll replay the Amiable Skeptics episode in which Adam Baldwin and I discussed Michael Shellenberger’s exposé of WPATH and the medical chicanery behind “gender affirming care,” especially when targeting children and teens. Pope Francis has helped to keep the focus on the damage being done by belief systems that rely on and promote narcissism … until it kills the spirit, if not the body.