The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) this week officially prohibited Catholic hospitals from providing pro-“transgender” surgical and hormonal procedures.
The USCCB decided in a 206-8 vote, with seven abstentions, during its 2025 Plenary Assembly in Baltimore, Maryland, to make this update in the seventh edition of “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.”
Their intention was to have the newest update on that set of directives reflect the teaching of the 2024 Vatican document Dignitas Infinita and the USCCB Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body, according to a USCCB infographic on the assembly’s updates. The new edition of the directives incorporates the teaching of Dignitas Infinita that any interventions attempting to change a person’s sex “[risk] threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”
“In order to respect the nature of the human person as a unity of body and soul,” the seventh-edition USCCB directive states, “Catholic health care services must not provide or permit medical interventions, whether surgical, hormonal, or genetic, that aim not to restore but rather to alter the fundamental order of the human body in its form or function.
“This includes, for example, some forms of genetic engineering whose purpose is not medical treatment, as well as interventions that aim to transform sexual characteristics of a human body into those of the opposite sex (or to nullify sexual characteristics of a human body).”
The directive also emphasizes Catholic hospitals’ responsibility to holistically support people suffering from gender dysphoria.
“In accord with the mission of Catholic health care, which includes serving those who are vulnerable, Catholic health care providers ‘must employ all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who experience gender incongruence or gender dysphoria,’” the document states, quoting the doctrinal note, “and to provide for the full range of their health care needs, employing only those means that respect the fundamental order of the human body.”
The full text of the seventh edition can be read here.
The Catholic Health Association of the United States said in a Nov. 12 statement that the newest edition of the directives “reaffirm the Church’s teaching on the dignity of all persons and their right to life from conception to natural death.”
The association said it will thoroughly review the directives in the coming weeks with its members, and added, “the changes made in this new edition of the ERDs clarify and affirm current clinical practices.”
The added directives prohibiting pro-“transgender” intervention “are consistent with Catholic health care practice that does not allow for medical interventions that alter sexual characteristics absent an underlying condition,” the association added.
This article was updated Nov. 14 at 12:22 PM.