From WWW.BREITBART.COM
ROME — The United States Catholic Bishops have issued guidelines banning surgical and chemical intervention aimed at exchanging “the sex characteristics of a patient’s body for those of the opposite sex.”
In a March 20 “Doctrinal Note,” the bishops rule out certain forms of medical interventions in Catholic healthcare institutions such as puberty blockers and sex reassignment surgery, insisting that the do not promote the authentic good of the human person but are, in fact, injurious.
“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 declare.
While modern technology offers important interventions that have led to the cure of many maladies and promises for more, the bishops write, it also “produces interventions that are injurious to the true flourishing of the human person.”
The interventions advocated by many as treatments for “gender dysphoria” or “gender incongruence” 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,” the doctrinal note states, and thus Catholic healthcare services must not perform them.
The bishops recall a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith that “there is an order in the natural world that was designed by its Creator and that this created order is good,” and therefore, we are called “to respect it.”
This respect for creation is especially important in the case of the human person, “since humanity occupies a singular place in the created order, being created in the image of God,” the bishops continue…. (Read more)
