CV NEWS FEED // Several prominent liberal Catholics, including Fr. James Martin, have denounced the U.S. Bishops’ recent document condemning “transgender” medical procedures, “On the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body.”
The National Catholic Reporter took issue with how the document forbids individuals and Catholic providers from undergoing or performing “gender-affirming medical treatments.” The liberal outlet’s article says the USCCB’s document “lacks sound science and trans voices,” disagreeing with this passage in particular:
Any technological intervention that does not accord with the fundamental order of the human person as a unity of body and soul, including the sexual difference inscribed in the body, ultimately does not help but, rather, harms the human person.
Similarly, Jesuit media personality Fr. James Martin took to Twitter to share a webinar by a religious sister who considers the U.S. Bishops’ stance “spiritual abuse.”
Franciscan priest Fr. Daniel Horan also wrote in The National Catholic Reporter that the document’s authors “not only deny the reality of transgender, nonbinary and intersex persons, but they also compound the harm experienced by already very vulnerable people.”
The Vatican reaffirmed the Church’s teachings on the dignity of the human person as created male and female in the 2019 document “Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education.”
“This defiance of the bishop’s crucial document is a blatant denial of Church teaching by those who call themselves ‘Catholic,’” said CatholicVote Director of Communications Joshua Mercer.
“There is a clear difference between how gender ideologues ‘identify’ people with gender dysphoria and what the reality about them objectively is,” Mercer added. “Our bishops, in this circumstance, have chosen a response that compassionately acknowledges the struggle that gender dysphoria can be, while refusing to allow the destruction of the bodies of God’s children.”
