BALTIMORE (LifeSiteNews) — Two prominent pro-LGBT American cardinals are attempting to stall a formal revision to the U.S. bishop’s directives to Catholic hospitals and healthcare institutions that would ban “transgender” mutilation of the human body and chemical castration through puberty blockers and hormone infusions.
During discussions about incorporating an instruction issued in March by the Doctrinal Committee for the Bishops’ Conference – which forbade so-called “gender transition” surgeries and drugs as contrary to the natural order inherent in the human body and intended by God as Creator – Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego called for greater so-called pastoral outreach to members of the LGBT community, claiming the instruction did not address “the existential question of those who are suffering from dysphoria.”
McElroy joined Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark in calling for consultations with “transgender” persons to be part of the revision process of the directives. Tobin criticized the instruction for its “limited consultation” with transgender-identifying individuals, in a thinly veiled attempt to stall a condemnation of the ideology and practices adopted by such persons.
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Unsurprisingly, both cardinals have a record of taking pro-LGBT stances. McElroy has openly and aggressively advocated for the giving of Holy Communion to those who are sexually active outside of marriage, including both heterosexual and homosexual activity, a position that earned him public rebuke from fellow bishops, with Bishop Thomas Paprocki suggesting he may have excommunicated himself for public adherence to heresy. McElroy himself offered a so-called LGBT Mass with his Auxiliary Bishop John Dolan in 2017 in San Diego, which featured a nationally known drag queen, who was allowed to speak from the pulpit. Tobin has also long supported LGBT groups in his diocese for years.
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The document to be incorporated into the bishops’ directives to Catholic hospitals and healthcare institutions, titled “Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body,” was written by the bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, chaired by Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas. The text was published March 20 and, while directed especially to Catholic medical institutions, lays out the principles of a Catholic approach to the issue of gender-related surgery and medicine in a way that is instructive for all the faithful, especially given the increased attempts to impose acceptance of transgender ideology in schools, businesses, legislatures, and even churches.
The bishops condemned transgender ideology as a modern version of dualism that rejects the human body as a constitutive part of the human person. The bishops stated that such ideology, which maintains that a person can be born in the “wrong kind of body” and can “change” his or her body into that of the opposite sex, fails to see the inherent unity of body and soul as well as the natural order of the sexually distinct male and female body.
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The bishops then denounced the wide practice and range of “technical interventions” proposed as “treatments” for so-called “gender dysphoria” or “gender incongruence” that “involve the use of surgical or chemical techniques that aim to exchange the sex characteristics of a patient’s body for those of the opposite sex or for simulations thereof,” and which “in the case of children… is prepared [for] by the administration of chemical puberty blockers, which arrest the natural course of puberty and prevent the development of some sex characteristics in the first place.”
In no uncertain terms, the bishops condemned all such transgender procedures, declaring, “These technological interventions are not morally justified either as attempts to repair a defect in the body or as attempts to sacrifice a part of the body for the sake of the whole.”
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In accord with the condemnation of such procedures, the bishops instructed Catholic healthcare institutions and services to refrain from any and all gender-transitioning interventions, “whether surgical or chemical,” which they declared ultimately harm the human person.
They wrote, “Such interventions, thus, do not respect the fundamental order of the human person as an intrinsic unity of body and soul, with a body that is sexually differentiated. Bodiliness is a fundamental aspect of human existence, and so is the sexual differentiation of the body. Catholic health care services must not perform interventions, whether surgical or chemical, that aim to transform the sexual characteristics of a human body into those of the opposite sex or take part in the development of such procedures. They must employ all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who struggle with gender incongruence, but the means used must respect the fundamental order of the human body.”
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