Rome's Doctrine Czar Permits Genital Mutilation in Cases of Acute Gender Confusion

Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández devises a loophole in Rome’s recent ruling against gender ideology

Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith

In an historic rupture with Catholic teaching, the head of the Vatican’s doctrine watchdog has issued clarifications permitting the mutilation of gender-confused individuals who are seeking gender reassignment.

“There are cases outside the norm, such as strong dysphorias that can lead to an unbearable existence or even suicide,” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, announced in an undated post on the DDF and Vatican websites.

“We do not want to be cruel and say that we do not understand the conditioning of the human person and the deep suffering that exists in some cases of ‘dysphoria,’ which has also been manifested since childhood.”

The cardinal’s statement softening Rome’s position on gender ideology was originally delivered to the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Cologne, on February 17, in a lecture titled “The Ontological Dignity of the Person in ‘Dignitas Infinita’ — Some Clarifications.”

“Exceptional Situations” Don’t Apply to the Death Penalty

The papal declaration, Dignitas Infinita: On Human Dignity, had ruled that “any sex-change intervention, as a rule (di norma), risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”

Fernández clarified that Dignitas Infinita’s “reference to ‘as a rule’ does not exclude the possibility of cases that fall outside the norm, such as severe dysphoria, which can lead to an unbearable life or even suicide.”

“These exceptional situations must be evaluated with great care,” he cautioned. “Sex change is not a merely external change or comparable to normal cosmetic surgery or an intervention to cure a disease. It is the claim of a change of identity, of wanting to be another person.”

In his clarification, issued exclusively in German and Italian, the cardinal also reiterated Pope Francis’s magisterial and categorical rejection of the death penalty — a doctrinal pronouncement that has outraged faithful Catholics who affirm the changelessness of magisterial teaching.

“By rejecting the death penalty, Pope Francis wanted to show the extent of our convictions on the inalienable dignity of the human person,” Fernández explained.

Neither Francis nor Fernández have made any provision for permitting capital punishment in “exceptional situations.”

Arming Anti-Christian Forces

Catholic theologian John Gravino, who predicted the tactics Pope Francis would adopt to change magisterial teaching on sexuality, told The Stream that “LGBT equality in the Church has been a primary objective of Catholic leftists since the 70s.”

“Francis revived this movement with the publication of Amoris Laetitia. Of course, the pope does not have the authority to veto God’s commandments. But that doesn’t matter to the Left. They can pretend,” said Gravino, author of the groundbreaking Confronting the Pope of Suspicion.

Gravino elaborated:

Leftist judges can pretend that Francis changed the teaching on LGBT equality. And with that, the conscience rights of Catholics will no longer be protected by the First Amendment. No Catholic will be able to defend himself from the coming LGBT invasion on the grounds that “gay equality violates my religious beliefs.” Leftist judges will be able to deny such claims on the grounds that “Pope Francis changed your religious beliefs.”

Meanwhile, the TransCatholic ministry announced on its website that “the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA) has been publishing several articles about transgender care in a Catholic setting that will be reassuring to the 1 in 6 people in the U.S. that depend on Catholic hospitals for their healthcare and may have a transgender person in their family.”

According to a CHA statement dating back to 2016, “there is no definitive magisterial church teaching on transgenderism or gender dysphoria.”

Catholic Medical Ethicists Call Genital Mutilation “Neutral”

A CHA article called “Transgender Persons and Catholic Healthcare,” also published in 2016, argues in favor of surgery for gender-confused individuals since “evidence suggests changes in genetics, hormone delivery and brain structures are related to the incidence of gender dysphoria; it is not a choice.”

“Transpersons are persons who, it can be argued, are either missing normal breasts (MtF), or have them accidentally (FtM), due to a different kind of pathology,” the author, Dr. Carol Bayley, maintains.

Bayley argues that genital surgery “itself is neutral” and “the good effect, from the perspective of the person undergoing it, is that his or her body will come to present to the world the person in the gender he or she experiences inside.”

A second CHA article by Fr. Kevin FitzGerald, a Jesuit priest who is an ethics professor at Georgetown University, argues that “the traditional physical and behavioral differences we might easily associate with our female-male dichotomy may actually be more of a spectrum of possible combinations between the two sexes/genders than we have previously thought.”

Catholic Hospitals Capitulate to Transgender Lobby

Leading Catholic hospitals in the U.S. are already performing gender-reassignment surgeries on minors, blatantly contradicting Catholic teaching from Rome and from the U.S. Bishops’ Doctrine Committee, The Stream reported in October.

The stoptheharmdatabase.com lists multiple Catholic hospitals, including Providence Health & Services, the nation’s fourth-largest Catholic health system, according to an analysis by Catholic Vote, which shows that at least 170 children underwent “gender-affirming” surgeries and 508 received cross-sex hormone or puberty-blocker prescriptions at Catholic hospitals.

The hospitals appear to have been influenced by “Catholic Teaching on the Human Person and Gender Dysphoria,” published in 2019 by Catholic ethicist Dr. Peter J. Cataldo on the website of Heath Care Ethics USA (run by CHA). Cataldo argues that “within certain parameters, hormonal and surgical treatment for adults with gender dysphoria is not contrary to Catholic teaching.”

Using Aristotelian categories later developed by St. Thomas Aquinas, the ethicist claims that “sex is not part of the definition of human essence but being created as male or female is an inseparable accident of the individual existence of a person as a human substance.”

Is Gender Mutilation Intrinsically Evil?

In an article for the New Daily Compass, Catholic legal and moral philsopher Tommaso Scandroglio noted that the cardinal has introduced a “dangerous exception” to Rome’s original declaration — since for Fernández, gender reassignment is “morally acceptable, provided that the so-called dysphoria is severe.”

“We have seen that this expression [“as a rule”] is used by Dignitas Infinita in relation to genital surgery. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Fernández also uses it in relation to these,” Scandroglio writes. He goes on to explain how surgical interventions that seek to change the sex of a person are “intrinsically evil acts and remain so regardless of the conditions that motivate them.

“Cardinal Fernández has accepted the principle of ‘yes to sex reassignment.’ Once the principle has been accepted, logical consistency will take us from borderline cases to common cases, from the exceptional to the normal,” he warned.

“The prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith had qualified the transsexual condition as morally acceptable.”

Originally published in The Stream.

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Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.