This week, the Vatican released a document approved by Pope Leo XIV advising against cosmetic surgery.

The document, titled “Thinking about Christian anthropology in light of certain future scenarios for humanity,” said that plastic surgery could lead to a “cult of the body” and an unrealistic pursuit of the perfect figure.

The Vatican’s International Theological Commission said that “the perception of the body and its meaning” are changing — partly due to cosmetic surgery.

The Catholic Church teaches that the human body is made in the image of God, and though the Church does not explicitly prohibit plastic surgery, it maintains that Catholics shouldn’t get these procedures simply for vanity.

The new document doesn’t beat around the bush, noting that “Especially in the West, advances in cosmetic surgery…offer tools ?that significantly change the relationship with one’s corporeality and therefore with reality and with others.”

“This leads to a widespread ‘cult of the body’ follows, which tends towards a frantic search for a perfect figure, which always stays fit, young and beautiful.”

This modification — which the Vatican said is often done with an “incessant frenzy” — can lead to a distorted relationship with one’s body, the commission argued.

“We cannot ignore the trends that reduce the body to biological material to be enhanced, transformed, and remodeled at will,” the commission declared.
Cosmetic procedures can create a relationship where the person “is no longer his or her body but ‘owns’ a body, from which arises the search for a ‘borrowed’ identity.”

It warned that cosmetic surgery can lead to changing your body “according to the tastes of the moment.
“A curious situation is created: the ideal body is exalted, sought after and cultivated, while the real body is not truly loved, being a source of limitations, fatigue and ageing,” the Church warned.

“One desires a perfect body, while dreaming of escaping from one’s own concrete body and its limitations.”

Essentially, the commission argued that changing your body and face does not necessarily lead to loving your body.

The Church’s pushback against cosmetic procedures joins the many lay people who are criticizing the accessibility of cosmetic procedures, weight loss jabs and the dubious looksmaxxing trend.
And while the idea isn’t uniquely Catholic, the commission’s main argument is rooted in spirituality.

“These transformations influence the relationship with the Mystery of the origin and ultimate end of human life,” the document said. “When human beings reduce created nature (person, cosmos) to matter to be transformed, they no longer manifest the glory of the Creator, but replace him.”