Catholic Review

Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

A photo illustration shows a general practitioner with a stethoscope. (OSV News photo/Regis Duvignau, Reuters)

Theologian explores modern society’s manipulation of body and identity


By
OSV News Filed Under: Commentary, Health Care

As modern technology continues to offer interventions impacting the appearance of the human body, the question remains of where humans get their identity. Angela Franks, associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America, recently spoke with OSV News’ Charles Camosy about her book “Body and Identity,” which addresses this question.

Charles Camosy: Can you tell us a bit about the parts of your story which led you to be interested in questions about the body in a Catholic theological context?

Angela Franks: I had been involved with the pro-life movement since my youth, and as a result I became interested in the historical question of the involvement of Planned Parenthood with the eugenics movement.

I published a book on the question, but it was a historical work with a certain amount of social ethics in the mix, not theological at all. Simultaneously, I was writing my dissertation on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s trinitarian theology. (Writing a book while you are writing your dissertation is not recommended for really good reasons. Seriously, don’t do it.) So it seemed as though the two interests would just move on parallel tracks, never to meet. But with the moral questions around contraception and then gender, my experience teaching John Paul II’s theology of the body numerous times became increasingly relevant.

My interests converged when I realized that our body problems are actually often identity problems, and the answer to our identity questions is found in the triune God.

Camosy: And then you became so interested that you wrote a very important book for the University of Notre Dame Press, titled “Body and Identity.” Can you give us the central argument you make in this book?

Franks: If our body problems are often identity questions, it seems important to explore identity more closely. As I was doing so, the historical chapters blew up to become an entire book.

I trace the history of identity and show that the pre-modern world had many resources for understanding what we now call identity, and we should give those answers another look. I also argue that modern thought is often secularizing Christian instincts and running to extremes with them. Thus, it is first Christianity that argues that identity is not a matter primarily of your family or nation or class; it is constituted instead by God’s call to you.

Modern thought accepts the rejection of social structures as identity-formative while it negates the Christian content of identity. We are, I argue, left with liquid bodies and empty selves.

Camosy: No doubt your expertise in this particular space led you to be a special theological consultant for the U.S. bishops, and in particular the Committee on Doctrine. What were the signs of the times that led the U.S. bishops to become particularly interested in questions of body and identity?

Franks: The broader context is the centuries-long modern experiment with an increasingly technological age, such that human problems are often viewed as body problems that can be fixed by technology.

Obviously, we have body problems that can be fixed by technology! I had the experience of placenta previa in a pregnancy; my baby’s placenta was completely covering the cervix, and once labor started, I could have bled to death. The only solution was a C-section, and I am very grateful for this technological intervention that kept me alive. That is an example of technology being used to restore a person to health, to the normal human baseline.

But we moderns have constantly been tempted to use technology to disrupt the very idea of any human norm of health. For example, some people find cosmetic surgeons who will implant horns under their skin.

That is not the restoration to human normality but instead the negation of any attempt to define human normality. The philosophical term I am thinking of when I speak of human normality is “human nature.” Is it natural for human persons to have horns?

But under a technocratic regime, as Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis were especially strong in insisting, the question is not, “is it natural or healthy?” but merely “is it technologically possible?”

The British theorist Mary Harrington argues that the application of such technocracy to human life is transhumanism, and she finds the first successful example of transhumanism in the birth control pill. With the pill, for the first time, medicine was dedicated not to restoring health but to disrupting it; after all, a fertile body is a healthy body. This disruption was in the name of the freedom to craft one’s identity sexually.

The disregard for what is natural to human persons in favor of technologically manipulating the body in order to serve one’s freedom and identity is seen clearly in the recent experiments with transgenderism. The U.S. bishops realized early that there needed to be a clear response to these new and yet old questions.

The first substantial response was the publication of the 2023 Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body, which was the fruit of a multiyear process on the part of the Committee on Doctrine.

The bishops on the committee took their responsibility very seriously. They interviewed many trans individuals and their families, as well as doctors, hospital groups and medical ethicists. The result is a wonderful, compassionate yet clear statement of Catholic teaching on the goodness of embodied human sexual difference.

Camosy: Sometimes our profession gets critiqued for living in our own heads in ways that have little impact on the outside world. And while the life of the mind is important to cultivate for its own sake, you had the wonderful opportunity to help shape the Ethics and Religious Directives that were just passed by the U.S. bishops during their annual meeting in Baltimore. Can you speak in particular to the directives related to the body and identity? What does this mean, practically speaking, for U.S. Catholic health care?

Franks: I came in late in the process, so most of the hard work had already been done. But I really felt privileged to be in the room with such serious-minded and committed people who were united in their concern to translate the theology of the Doctrinal Note into practical assistance for Catholic health care providers.

The Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) are about 100 years old. Originally, they were crafted to ensure that Catholic hospitals would not engage in eugenic sterilization, among other things, and they were a one-page list of do’s and mostly don’ts. They were posted on the walls of many operating rooms.

In the early 1990s, it was decided that the U.S. bishops shouldn’t miss the opportunity to do some catechesis around these directives, and so the ERDs were expanded to include more theological content. And, of course, every time there are new bioethical issues, the ERDs need to be revised and clarified.

In the seventh edition just approved, various directives were edited or added, but the most significant additions centered around providing true care for patients with gender dysphoria.

Directive 29 quotes the Doctrinal Note and states, “In accord with the mission of Catholic health care, which includes serving those who are vulnerable, Catholic health care services and providers ‘must employ all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who experience gender incongruence or gender dysphoria’ 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.”

I know the bishops get a lot of bad press, but American Catholics should be very proud of their bishops’ international leadership on this issue; the entire Catholic world is in fact in debt to America on this score.

As a country, we have the theological resources and personnel — lay, clerical, and episcopal — to be able to craft documents and directives that can benefit people beyond our borders. I am not aware of any other bishops’ conference that has produced something like the latest ERDs, with their precision about what does and does not serve the dignity of the sexually differentiated body in health care. I was truly honored to be part of the process developing them.

To close the circle on the body’s relation to identity: Human identity includes the reality of our bodiliness. I am not some inner spiritual core that is only temporarily and unfortunately housed in this body. Each one of us is, as the Doctrinal Note says, “not two natures united” but rather, in the union of body and soul, a “single nature. … A soul can never be in another body, much less be in the wrong body.”

The ambient transhumanism in our culture both idolizes and scorns the body, given how the body limits us in often grievous ways. But the truth is that we are limited, and not just by our bodies; we are limited by our nature and by being creatures. We are not God. Yet if we only focus on what we are not, we’ll be like Adam, grasping after being like God, when he was already made in God’s image and likeness, even in his limitations. The Creator is calling us to the healthy acceptance of our bodies and ourselves in light of his loving plan for us.

Read More Commentary

Copyright © 2025 OSV News

Print Print