For some years, I have tried to determine what the Catholic Church officially believes about people who identify as transsexual. This is not as easy as you might think.

Now, Catholicism has a great deal to say about specific sexual acts. To wit, unless it is a sexual act act that is open to life, performed freely in a loving, male-female marriage, the Catholic Church is Not For It. Several pages of the Catechism are devoted to going through common sex acts and gently, politely identifying them as gravely evil and harmful to all participants. Masturbation: bad. Fornication: bad. Prostitution: bad. Adultery: bad. Contraception: bad. And so forth. A little ways above this section, there’s a discussion of the importance of distinct maleness and femaleness, their complementarity, their role in driving humans to communion with one another, and how they figure in God’s overall plan for humanity.

This, then, is where we find the Catechism’s condemnation of all homosexual acts, although the authors take pains to clarify that the Church does not condemn homosexual persons. Gay and lesbian Catholics cannot, after all, be “open to life” in sex acts with members of the same sex. Even if they could, these acts would not conform to the Church’s understanding of complementarity between the sexes. Since all Catholics, including gay and lesbian Catholics, are called to chastity, this pretty clearly rules out sexual gratification of any kind within a same-sex relationship. (The Catechism notoriously fails to suggest what positive vocations gay and lesbian Catholics might be called to, but that’s another story.)

But being transsexual is not at all the same as being gay. Some people experience an interior sensation that their apparent physical sex is incorrect. People who appear to be males (and even have male genitalia) believe themselves to be truly female, and vice versa.  Often, they say they are “trapped in” or were “born into” the “wrong body.” We call these people “transsexuals.”

(To be clear: I am talking in this post specifically about transsexuals, those who desire to transform their bodies to reflect their perceived sex. There is a broader movement of “trans*” identities, which includes identification such as “bigender,” “agender,” and “genderqueer.” I confess I cannot make heads or tails of these identities, and suspect that those using them are using a definition of “gender” so subjective as to be either trivial or meaningless or both. Perhaps this subjectivity is considered a justified reaction against socially-imposed gender roles, which are real and often oppressive. In any event, this post is not about trans* identities broadly. I am aware that “transsexual” is now seen as somewhat archaic, but I am unaware of any more modern term that specifically identifies this particular subset of trans* persons)

In many ways, the transsexual experience runs directly counter to the prevailing narrative of the LGBT movement. Where gays, lesbians, and many trans* individuals insist that gender doesn’t matter at all, because “love is love” and identity is completely plastic, trans* people experience deep, profound alienation from their bodies, because they gender matters more than practically anything else. Their dysphoria is not remotely plastic, much to their regret. Our culture, led by the LGB movement at large, has worked very hard to imagine that all gender differences are the result of social conditioning and kyriarchy, a kind of gender nominalism that finds its apex in the same-sex marriage movement. But transsexual people affirm a kind of gender realism that has become almost alien to our culture–at least, outside of the Catholic Church.

And, sure enough, the Catechism has exactly nothing to say about transsexual persons. There is not a word about them. (No, CCC 2297 doesn’t count, but good try.) Nor does any teaching directly addressing them readily appear anywhere in Church history. Certainly, the Catholic Church affirms the beauty of maleness and femaleness, as does the Catechism. But the Catechism does not clearly define “maleness” or “femaleness” as being rooted in chromosomes, genitals, psychology, hormones, or something else.

So might it be possible that there are people with female souls born into bodies that, by dint of a birth defect, develop as male bodies? We know birth defects are real, and sometimes even make gender ambiguous (in the case of intersex people). Is it possible that transsexuals’ tremendous desire to transition is well-founded? That it is based on a justified desire to correct a serious physical disorder? That the transsexual experience actually affirms what the Church teaches about the ontological reality of gender?

For various reasons, I personally think that the answer to all those questions is almost certainly “no.” I shan’t explain those reasons here, however, because my opinion, no matter how well-considered, is not the teaching of the Catholic Church! Even if I think those notions are wrongheaded, one can still hold them and be a faithful Catholic! So what has the Church said?

For most of my life, there have been two well-known documents regarding Catholic teaching on transsexuality, only one of which likely exists.

The first document is a 1997 article by Fr. Urbano Navarrete, S.J., entitled “Transsexuality and the Canonical Order.” It deals with various questions relating to how a transsexual person may (or may not) participate in certain strongly gendered parts of Church life, such as marriage, the ordained priesthood, and vowed religious life. A translation was online at some point, but seems to be offline now. I’ve restored it just now.

The second document is an alleged 2002 document sent secretly by the Vatican to the bishops of the world. It was reported in the Catholic News Service by Mr. John Norton. Purportedly, this document stated that sex-change operations do not change a person’s “true” gender and should not lead to the alteration of baptismal records, etc. Furthermore, this document allegedly stated that sex-change surgeries “could be morally acceptable in certain extreme cases if a medical probability exists that it will ‘cure’ the patient’s internal turmoil.”

However, with all due respect to Mr. Norton, I do not believe this document exists. I have searched high and low for it for over a decade. I have had a friend poke around in the Vatican Archives for it. I have reached out to people alleged to have knowledge of it, only to get flat denials that they’ve ever heard of it. Its non-existence, however, has not stopped the sub secretum document from having a profound effect on Catholic discussions of transsexuality. In the absence of real teaching, what else was there?

Just last week, Catholic thinking on gender issues was updated by a new document, “Male and Female He Created Them,” released by a minor Vatican dicastery. (It is curiously dated February 2019, even though its release date was June 10th.) Tuned-in Catholics probably thought this post was a timely reaction to that new document! But, joke’s on you: I haven’t had a chance to read “Male and Female” yet, so I offer no opinions on it. I’ll only note that, while we should welcome all new Vatican contributions to this conversation, the new document lacks the imprimatur of the Pope or even the Holy Office, still less the ordinary and universal magisterium. No matter what it says, there will be plenty of room for dissent, and plenty of people (on both sides) fully prepared to dissent from it.

A day after “Male and Female,” Jennifer Haselberger pointed out yet another document.

Haselberger is a canon lawyer who made a name for herself trying to evangelize the local post-Catholic women’s college. She fought to bring the sacraments back to campus, placed Marian statues in surprising places, and so forth. She eventually became Chancellor for Canonical Affairs at the Archdiocese, where she learned about serious scandals which she heroically exposed at great cost to her career. She now works at the Robbins Collection at Berkeley. (Full disclosure: two decades ago, Haselberger was a good friend of mine, although, to my regret, I don’t believe we’ve spoken in person in over fifteen years.)

Haselberger found “Male and Female He Created Them” disappointing. She pointed out, in contrast, a document I’ve never heard mentioned in any discussion of the issue anywhere: an April 14, 1975 decision of the Roman Rota in a marriage nullity case. I couldn’t find a copy online.

So, of course, I headed down to the library today, found the decision, and made a copy. Here it is. Discussion below.

RomanRota_TransvestitesTran… by on Scribd

The Roman Rota, as I understand it, is the highest appellate court in the Catholic Church. (The Apostolic Signatura is the court of final appeal on procedural matters only.) Much like the Supreme Court, it rehears difficult cases decided in Church courts around the world and decides whether the original decisions were correct or not. (Did you know the Catholic Church has a fully functioning legal system, the oldest in the world?) The vast majority of cases in the Catholic legal system are petitions for marriage nullity.

Christ declared that sacramental marriage is indissoluble (in nearly all circumstances). Once you’ve validly married somebody, you’re married for life. However, in order to count as a valid marriage, certain conditions have to be met: at the time of the wedding, both husband and wife must be capable of freely entering marriage. They cannot be under duress, cannot be high on drugs, cannot be already married to somebody else, must genuinely intend to enter a faithful and fertile marriage, and must meet various other requirements. If you later discover that you or your spouse didn’t meet those requirement on your wedding day, you can ask the Church to investigate whether your marriage was ever valid. If not, the Church will declare the marriage annulled. The marriage is not dissolved; it is recognized to have never existed in the first place. (This frees both parties to marry somebody else.)

In this particular 1975 case, a woman known to us only as M. married a man, R., in 1946. Soon after their wedding, R. came out to M. as trans. R felt that R’s true identity was female. This first manifested as transvestism, but proved deeper than that. They had several children, but struggled. In 1971, R divorced M in civil court. In 1972, M asked the Church to consider grounds for an annulment on the basis that R–being transsexual–was incapable of giving matrimonial consent, performing the duties of marriage, or, indeed, of being married to M at all, given R’s asserted identity as a female.

Ms. Haselberger notes several passages wherein the tribunal allows that, under Roman law (which is the basis of Catholic canon law), there are various ways in which R’s self-identification could be and perhaps ought to be respected. For example, on page 759, the Rota clearly suggests that there would be no problem respecting R’s sexual self-identification in matters of “ordering one’s purely external or social life,” so that it would, for example, be fine for R to avail himself “of wearing men’s or women’s clothing, of giving testimony in instruments, of the right to determine an heir.”

The Rota makes no explicit mention of the most immediate practical difficulty facing contemporary Catholics who have trans* friends or coworkers: the question of whether it is morally licit to use a transsexual’s preferred name and/or pronouns. However, their logic seems to push toward the conclusion that the use of preferred pronouns would be acceptable, perhaps even to be encouraged.

On the other hand, the Rota does ultimately rule in favor of the marriage. They rule that R is, ontologically, a male; that he (this is the pronoun the Rota chooses) validly contracted marriage to M; that his desire to be a female did not prevent him from consenting as the male partner; that he was (and continued to be) capable of participating in the sexual act as a male; and that R remains married to M, in a male-female conjugal union, until death do them part. This is hardly the ruling transsexual Catholics would have hoped for.

The decisions of the Roman Rota, especially in private cases like this one, are not considered official magisterial teaching and do not bind the consciences of any Catholics except the parties before the court. However, canon lawyers are forced to reason through complicated issues of law and doctrine very carefully in order to reach their decisions, and reading through that is often enlightening. Moreover, the Rota’s precedents matter a great deal in how future cases will be decided. So this document is by no means infallible, nor do I believe it is it even considered “authoritative” in the technical, Catholic, magisterial sense of the word.

But it’s nevertheless an instructive look at how the Vatican has reasoned through issues of transsexuality in the past, and, in the absence of more authoritative teaching, I think it’s well worth taking a look at it.

Thanks to Ms. Haselberger for pointing it out.

So, not infrequently, I find myself reading a Vatican document, encountering a citation that records nothing but a Denzinger number, and then spending an hour searching the internet for an English translation of that number.  When that fails (and it usually does), I have to go to the Latin text (which is online, albeit illegally) and translate it for myself.  This can take hours.

From now on, as my contribution to the Internet, whenever I translate one of these obscure documents, I am going to post the Latin text and the translation to this blog.  Those of you who are regular readers will find these posts disjointed and deadly dull.  But those of you who are finding this blog because you’ve been wandering around Google for an hour trying to find a reliable translation of Denzinger 2795… you’ve come to the right place!  The translations are not literal, and I can make no guarantee that my Latin is accurate; I only studied it for five years, and never became fluent.  (I would welcome corrections.)

Today, I translated Denzinger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 2795 and 3634, which are cited in Footnote 47 of the Pontifical Council for the Family’s document, Vademecum for Confessors Concerning Some Aspects of the Morality of Conjugal Life, Section 3.13.  (For context, the Vademecum is here posing a question about whether a person can have sex with a spouse who is contracepting against the will of the other spouse.) Here they are.

Denzinger 2795: “The Onanistic Act in Marriage,” Decree of the Holy Office, 6 April 1853:

Qu. l) An usus imperfectus matrimonii, sive onanistice sive condomistice (seu adhibito nefario instrumento vulgo ‘condom’) fiat, prout in casu, sit licitus? 2) An uxor sciens in congressu condomistico possit passive se praebere ? Resp. (decr. 6., publ. 19 avril): Ad 1) Negative; est enim intrinsece malus. Ad 2) Negative; daret enim operam rei intrinsece illicitae.

Q1) Can it be that, in a given case, an imperfect marital act (whether it be so by onanism or by the aid of the vile instrument vulgarly known as the “condom”) could ever be licit?

Q2) Can a wife consciously but passively make herself available to marital congress involving a condom?

A1) No, for it is an intrinsic evil.

A2) No, for she would give aid to an intrinsically illicit act.

Commentary: I, for one, thought Q1’s invective against the condom was hilariously over the top.  Q2 gives me pause for a moment: the very Vademecum which cites this passage says that a spouse can participate in a contraceptive act with their spouse, for serious reasons, so long as the spouse takes no part in the contraceptive part of the act.

But, on second thought, there’s a material difference between a condom (which disrupts the nature of the sexual act immediately) and a hormonal contraception pill (which disrupts it invisibly and much more remotely).  It’s not really possible to use a condom without the active participation of both partners, while something like The Pill really only involves the participation of one partner.

My third thought was,”Wait, so holy men can have sex with their contracepting wives, but holy wives can’t have sex with their contracepting men?  That sure doesn’t play into any stereotypes about the Holy Office.”

Denzinger 3634: Reply of the Sacred Penitentiary, 3 April 1916:

Qu.: Utrum mulier alicui actioni mariti, qui, ut voluptati indulgeat, crimen Onan aut Sodomitarum committere vult, illique sub mortis poena aut gravium molestiarum minatur, nisi obtemperet, cooperari licite possit? Resp.: a) Si maritus in usu coniugii committere vult crimen Onan effundendo scilicet semen extra vas post inceptam copulam idemque minetur uxori aut mortem aut graves molestias, nisi perversae eius voluntati sese accommodet, uxor ex probatorum theologorum sententia licite potest hoc in casu sic cum marito suo coire, quippe cum ipsa ex parte sua det operam rei et actioni licitae, peccatum autem mariti permittat ex gravi causa, quae eam excusat, quoniam caritas, qua illud impedire teneretur, cum tanto incommodo non obligat. b) At si maritus committere cum ea velit Sodomitarum crimen, cum hic sodomiticus coitus actus sit contra naturam ex parte utriusque coniugis sic coeuntis isque doctorum omnium iudicio graviter malus, hinc nulla plane de causa ne mortis quidem vitandae licite potest uxor hac in re impudico suo marito morem gerere.

Q: May a woman licitly cooperate in the action of her husband, who, wishing to commit the crime of Onan or the Sodomites (so that he may indulge in voluptuous pleasure), threatens her with death or grave harm, unless she cooperates?

a) According to the opinions of esteemed theologians, if a husband wishes to commit the crime of Onan in conjugal union (that is, he wishes to knowingly discharge semen outside the vagina after the beginning of copulation), and he threatens his wife with either death or grave injury unless she accomodates him in his perverse desires, his wife is lawfully able to have sexual intercourse with her husband in this way: she, for her own part, works toward the licit act of marital intercourse [i.e. she does all the things she normally ought to do when having sex, doing nothing onanistic herself -Ed.], but, on the other hand, she permits her husband to commit sin, because of the grave reason, which excuses her, since love, which her husband has been understood to obstruct, does not bind her to such grave harm.

(b) But if the husband should wish to commit with her the sin of the Sodomites, when sodomy is against nature on the part of either participant [“utriusque coniugis coeuntis”, lit. “either of the spouses fucking” -Ed.], thus the wickedness shifts decisively, in the judgement of all learned theologians: from here it is clear that from no cause, not even the avoidance of death, can the wife licitly comply in the shameless act of her husband.

Commentary: An interesting distinction is drawn here between “Onanism” (deliberately spilling semen outside the vagina) and the special case of “Sodomy” (deliberately spilling semen in a different orifice), but it’s not a moral difference, just a mechanical one.  In onanism, the sexual act is, for the most part, carried out normally.  The penis goes repeatedly into the vagina, and it feels good, and it is all perfectly natural, up to a point.  Up to that point, a wife can actively participate, aid, and even revel in the act of intercourse, because there’s nothing wrong with it.  At the very end, her husband pulls out and sprays his seed somewhere else (the bed, his hand, whatever).  This is unnatural and sinful and wrong, and the wife cannot participate, aid, or even will that it happen — but can allow it.

The term “sodomy”, in this context, encompasses anal sex, fellatio, or any other method of extra-vaginal penile stimulation carried through to ejaculation.  The Holy Office here argues that the mechanics are quite different.  While onanism is a natural act leading up to an unnatural one, “sodomic” acts are unnatural and unholy acts from their commission. Therefore there is nothing good about the act that the wife can actively participate in Holy Office.  Everything about it is intrinsically evil.  Since no person can actively do anything which is intrinsically evil under any circumstances, the wife cannot licitly cooperate in sodomy.  (Of course, if she cooperates anyway, it is under duress, which largely — but not entirely — excuses the sin.)

This opinion of the Holy Office (authoritative but not infallible) seems to conflict with the opinion of some faithful Catholic moralists today (such as Christopher West, or yours truly), which states that any sort of genital stimulation is permissible in an act of marital intercourse, so long as it is intended to culminate with some semen in the vagina.  If I answered this question, today, I would answer that the answer given for onanism applies to sodomy as well; the wife, under duress, can actively cooperate in all genital stimulation while foreseeing (but not willing or in any way facilitating) that her husband will ejaculate in a manner that is against nature.

It should be noted that “cooperate” and “comply” here imply active participation.  A spouse could simply offer no resistance to a spouse who tries to force anal sex through violence and threats of violence, without falling afoul of the Holy Office’s decree here.  (A spouse also, of course, has the right to resist vigorously, if practical.)  A spouse afraid for his or her life need is not required to resist an act of sodomy forced on him or her; he or she is simply forbidden from actively participating in the evil action.

Once again, my disclaimer: these translations are my own, and I cannot guarantee their accuracy, nor the accuracy of the commentaries which follow them.  You want a guaranteed-accurate translation, buy Ignatius Press’s Denzinger.

Latin Denzinger Online

UPDATE 16 Feb 2015: A priest-friend hooked me up with a copy of Ignatius’ Denzinger.  I can now confirm that I totally nailed these translations.