April 8, 2024

“Vatican Document Casts Gender Change and Fluidity as Threat to Human Dignity.”

The NYT reports.

Free access link.
The sex a person is born with, the document argued, was an “irrevocable gift” from God and “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.” People who desire “a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes,” risk conceding “to the age-old temptation to make oneself God.”

41 comments:

Michael said...

Hear! Hear! Now if we could just get them to be sensible on economics…

R C Belaire said...

This will not earn Francis any attaboys.

Enigma said...

Even the trendy pushover Pope Francis has his theological limits? Or, did he run up against an internal political brick wall after his prior accommodations?

He's 87 years old now.

Dave Begley said...

Just another reason for the Left to hate the Catholic Church for telling the truth.

Achilles said...

“Vatican Document Casts Gender Change and Fluidity as Threat to Human Dignity.”

The NYT reports.


Typically Eunuchs did not have much in the way of dignity. I would call turning someone into a sexless hermaphrodite a threat to their dignity.

That seems like an apt description.

In 5 years if we are not all wiped out by killer robots the people pushing this trans crap right now are going to be treated as they deserve. There are many kids being "transitioned" by absolutely despicable parents and an education establishment that has lost it's mind.

I think the likely outcome is a lot of these "trans activists" and anyone who spoke positively about "transitioning" anyone below the age of 18 have a high likelihood of being forcibly transitioned to trans status themselves.

rehajm said...

There goes their social credit score…

Paul said...

Well I am shocked... Catholic Clergy acting like Catholics are supposed to act.. and not like woke commie theologist.

Maybe there is hope yet for The Church.

Caroline said...

I suspect this will be mocked as Neanderthal thinking, as was the Church’s denunciation of the pill. But it’s useful to recall Pope Paul’s prescient warning about the total embrace of birth control: that separating procreation from sex would reap disastrous consequences; would cause a rise in divorce, an increase in the exploitation of women, increased acceptance of deviant sexual behavior. He wasn’t wrong.

rhhardin said...

The Vatican is concerned with plumbing when it's minds that they ought to be talking about.

Whether you abstract from feelings or multiply feelings doesn't seem to be fluid. The biological man still has a man's mind regardless of any fetish he takes up.

AlbertAnonymous said...

That’s a good start. Have to read the whole thing to make sure there’s none of the usual wishy washy Francis language.

The crazy left will hate this, the normal left will mock the church yet again. Some C & E Catholics may pull away, that’s ok (see John 6:66). The faithful understand.

Gusty Winds said...

The ugly push by the left is to create a small population of gender changed, genital mutilated people they can exploit to put front and center.

Think about it. They use Lia Thomas (NCAA swimmer). When he/she stands on the podium with his first place trophy...the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place women are taking a group photo away from him. He's standing there like a clown. All alone. So proud his testosterone won and unfair race. Where is the honor, or dignity in that?

Are women with penises allowed to hit real women without breaking the "never hit a woman" chivalrous code?

I don't like this globalist Pope. He's an asshole. But on this, he is right.

AlbertAnonymous said...

…and the first set of NYT readers comments are certainly everything you’d expect.

Gusty Winds said...

“to the age-old temptation to make oneself God.”

This is very common among the atheist, God hating left.

Look at the fake Global Warming scam. It's Tower of Babel bullshit. Bill Gates thinks we should block sunlight from reaching the earth. That's God complex delusional.

The First Commandment, "Thou shalt have to other gods before me" isn't about worshipping golden calves...it's about believing you are your own god.

If you violate the first commandment, the next nine don't mean shit. It all breaks down from there and everything falls apart. We are seeing it in America, and Western Europe as our societies turn their faces away from God.

Making money to cut the genitals off children, or prescribe them puberty blockers (like is happening at the University of Wisconsin) is probably the sickest example.

Wince said...

Oddly, aren't the Iranian Mullahs pro-sex change for homosexuals? You know, as an alternative to hanging or throwing them off rooftops.

Why Iran is a hub for sex-reassignment surgery
It is not because the regime is liberal

Attitudes towards sexuality can be rigid in Iran. A conservative former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, once declared that the country didn’t have any gay people. So it seems an unlikely hub for sex-reassignment surgery. But the procedure has been permitted since the mid-1980s, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini met a trans woman called Maryam Khatoon Molkara, who had been thrown into a psychiatric institution and forcibly injected with male hormones. Moved by her story, he issued a fatwa allowing the procedure, which a cleric later compared to changing wheat into bread. Today the government even helps with the cost.

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2019/04/04/why-iran-is-a-hub-for-sex-reassignment-surgery

Sex Reassignment Surgery in Iran, Re-Birth or Human Rights Violations against Transgender People?
Iran is the only Islamic country where the sex reassignment surgery (SRS) is recognized. Many European citizens travel to this Middle East country for gender confirmation and reassignment surgery. The Guardian wrote “Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran occupies the unlikely role of global leader for sex change.” Hence, Iran can be called the hell of homosexuals and the paradise of Trans seeking SRS.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9745420/

Dagwood said...

They must have written and released this while the anti-Pope was snoozing.

gilbar said...

when you've lost marxists at the Vatican..

gilbar said...

I'M SO OLD.. i remember when the left was Against genital mutilation

gilbar said...

of course, back then it was All Different!
then; it was moms taking their daughters in, to have their sex organs chopped off..
NOW! it is moms taking their daughters in, to have their sex organs chopped off....

wait a minute, that doesn't sound all that different; let me try again:
then; it was COLORED moms taking their daughters in, to have their sex organs chopped off..
NOW! it is white moms taking their daughters in, to have their sex organs chopped off......

now you can easily see the difference!

rwnutjob said...

Where's the anti-pope on this?
commie installed by a cabal of leftists over the rightful pontiff

PM said...

The Papal Bull is not a Papal Cow.

n.n said...

Science before faith, religion, and ideology. Good for the Pope.

mccullough said...

What’s The Roman Catholic Church take on Hermaphrodites? They are rare and not mentioned in the New Testament.

Of course, the Ancient Greeks addressed them.


Joe Smith said...

Maybe Francis isn't a complete communist after all...

'The Vatican is concerned with plumbing when it's minds that they ought to be talking about.'

Not plumbing, but God and nature.

Rick67 said...

the age-old temptation to make oneself God

If you dig down through the layers and many faces and forms of chaos we have observed in the last few decades not to mention since human history began *this* is the root cause.

Tolkien addressed this through his characters Melkor/Morgoth and Sauron.

Drago said...

gilbar: "I'M SO OLD.. i remember when the left was Against genital mutilation"

The Left/LLR-democratical Left was never against anything. Some token opposition was another example of using particular means until sufficient "power" critical mass is achieved after which their true Freak Flag flies in their never satisfied and desperate quest to destroy society completely in order to "rebuild" it in their very own marxist image.

Cappy said...

I think they're right.

Gusty Winds said...

Blogger mccullough said...
What’s The Roman Catholic Church take on Hermaphrodites?

Hermaphrodites have a rare genetic condition. Like any other sperm meets egg crapshoot. I wouldn't expect the church to have a position. Hermaphrodites have nothing to do with the current discussion or situation. It would be like asking "what is The Roman Catholic Church position on Down Syndrome". However the church might say, "don't abort them before birth".

The transgender agenda being driven by the godless left is about creating promoting, increasing, and normalizing mental disorders. The ultimate goal is to further erode the fabric of a once thriving society. It's evil. Therefore, the church takes a position.

Leland said...

It is almost like they are claiming the real issue behind transgenderism is narcissism.

AlbertAnonymous said...

The NYT readers’ comments would be funny if they weren’t so predictable.

Didn’t take long for someone to mock the document’s take on surrogacy “since Mary was the OG surrogate mom”

Can never tell if they truly have no understanding of the faith (and don’t care) or if they know but just can’t help from mocking for the fun of it.

And interesting that it comes on the same day the church is celebrating (at least in the US) Mary in the solemnity of the annunciation. Normally it’s March 25, but got pushed this year because Easter intervened.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I suspect this will wear well, and in fifty years people who are not at all sympathetic to Catholicism or even Christianity will reluctantly admit the Church had it right.

Mike Petrik said...

To answer the question posed above, while hermaphrodites have characteristics of both sexes, they either have a Y chromosome or they don’t. The sex determination is still binary.

Quaestor said...

The toes of Pope Francis are feeling the heat.

Patrick Driscoll said...

For once, Francis the talking Pope resists pandering to those who despise him.

MadTownGuy said...

Francis had best stay out of Scotland.

Ampersand said...

Let's put to one side the fact that transgenderism is a mix of social contagion, mental illness, and Lysenkoism.

The Vatican, which is even more gay than the US Department of State, has a problem. Its theology postulates a huge divide between men and women that excludes women from church hierarchy. It didn't start this way in the early Christian movement. There is a long story here, tracing its roots to the influence of pre Chistian culture which divided the spheres of (public) men and (private) women, the ideas of Plato and Aristotle which are central to Catholic theology, the rejection of woman centered early Christian movements such as gnosticism and Montanism, and the rise of misogynistic church fathers such as Tertullian, Iraneus, and Origen.

So the Pope can't possibly treat gender and sex as socially constructed identities that can be magically changed. Even a hint of doubt would collapse the edifice.

But he'll be happy to support communism, so long as it's his type of theistic.

The lesson here is that any wisdom you get from the papacy is some sort of accident.

Paddy O said...

I didn't see the link to the original document in the NYT article, so here it is:

Declaration “Dignitas Infinita” On Human Dignity

This really is an interesting (30 single spaced pages) document, as it strongly affirms bodily sanctity as part of the unity of the human person rather than as separate disputing parts.

It reaffirms the early Christian emphasis on the physicality of our true being, which sadly got ignored or dismissed at points throughout history. This has a lot of implications beyond the gender issues (including Francis's interest in liberation theologies). We are to treat people with love, love ourselves, and this includes how we treat their bodies and our bodies, how we understand what it means to be our "self." Know yourself, and this asserts that the self is to be understood as a unity of all our soul, body, mind, spirit. That is how we have been created, yet sin disturbs our self and our unity, causing chaos in us, and others, leading to death and despair. We are to love even still and find the hope in resurrection and salvation of our whole self.

walter said...

Boy, what's gotten into him..

Paddy O said...

I'm still not convinced that Tertullian was a misogynist, especially as he was a montanist. Very morally strict but he also wrote about women martyrs in a way that honored them.

And gnosticism doesn't seem pro women to me. Especially the end of the Gospel of Thomas. And their tendency to negate the body for prioritizing the soul/spirit seems just the thing that Trans arguments are making.

But I think you are saying a lot right, which I alluded to in my c9mment after yours...that the Church not only has been guilty of negating real bodies, but really set up the kind of philosophies in the secular west that it is now standing against. Atheism being another example...

Big Mike said...

I much enjoyed the headline at the Babylon Bee:

“Vatican Reluctantly Sides With God On Gender Theory”

Paddy O said...

"What’s The Roman Catholic Church take on Hermaphrodites?"

Having just finished reading through the document now, I see that it actually addresses this in the section on sex change:

"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."

Former Illinois resident said...

A decade ago, this Vatican position would be uncontroversial status quo.