ROME — Several groups of dissident Catholics have reacted fiercely to the Vatican’s recent confirmation of its unconditional support for human life and male-female complementarity.
On Monday, the Vatican published a declaration titled Dignitas Infinita, in which it reiterated the Catholic Church’s longstanding rejection of surrogacy, abortion, and gender fluidity, provoking outrage from progressive Catholic lobby groups who had hoped for greater doctrinal change under Pope Francis.
Dignitas Infinita “fails terribly by offering transgender and nonbinary people not infinite, but limited human dignity,” stated Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry — a “Catholic” LGBT advocacy group.
“In its approach to gender, the document relies on the outdated theology of gender essentialism which claims that a person’s physical appearance is the central evidence of a person’s natural gender identity,” DeBernardo added.
Similarly, Jamie Manson, the president of the pro-abortion Catholics for Choice, lamented that Catholic doctrine on abortion, contraception, and pregnancy has “forced countless women, many of them the poorest of the poor, to give birth,” which constitutes “violence against women.”
“Yet again, a group of all-male, celibate clergymen are telling women and gender-expansive people that their lived experiences are not real or valid,” Manson said of Dignitas Infinita.
“We don’t buy that women who choose abortion and Catholics who support abortion rights are ‘evil’ as this document suggests,” she contended.
Maddie Marlett, the leader of the Boston-based DignityUSA, an organization pushing LGBT rights in the Catholic Church, rejected the new Vatican text as insensitive to the experiences of transgender people.
“As a transwoman, I am told by this document I am playing God and misapplying my moral freedom,” said Marlett, a biological male. “This is not the reality of my life. My journey to self-acceptance was through realizing my self-worth as God’s creation.”
“This document’s adherence to long outdated beliefs about human anthropology conflicts with Pope Francis’ work to refocus the Catholic church as a listening church,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, DignityUSA’s Executive Director.
“It is also baffling that the Pope’s personal encounters with deeply faithful transgender people have not led the Vatican to take into account their stories of how gender-affirming care has allowed them to live full, rich, productive lives, and for them to finally experience the unity of body and soul,” she said.
Monday’s Vatican text said that “so-called surrogate motherhood” disrespects human life by turning the unborn child in the mother’s womb into “an object of trafficking.”
The text asserted that the dignity of the unborn human child is the same as the dignity of every human being, “has an intrinsic character and is valid from the moment of conception until natural death.”
Unborn children are, indeed, “the most defenseless and innocent among us,” the declaration noted, despite efforts “to deny them their human dignity.”
Regarding gender, the document said that gender theory is “extremely dangerous since it cancels differences in its claim to make everyone equal.”
Gender theory “intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference,” the declaration said. “This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them.”