The Body as God’s Creation

The Body as God’s Creation names the conviction at the center of Vincent Benítez’s account of his intersex condition: after learning that his body differed from what he had always believed, he considered surgery but ultimately refused it, judging that changing his body would be more sinful than accepting it as God’s handiwork. In his conversation with Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli, this belief links his childhood, religious vocation, medical discovery, and decision to remain in the ministry. It also shifts the question from whether his body should be corrected to who has the authority to call it defective.

The Body Before Its Diagnosis

Benítez explains that he was born to very poor parents in the Philippines, where, as he puts it, boys were more prized than girls. Because his physical difference made it easy for him to pass as a boy, his parents believed that he was one, and he shared that belief. His body did not arrive in his life as a medical problem awaiting a name: he grew up understanding himself through the identity his family and surroundings took for granted.

His account emphasizes how little opportunity there was for that assumption to be questioned. Seminary life was modest and avoided uncovering the body; neither he nor those around him had a reason to suspect a difference. He says he observed his vows of chastity throughout his life. These details place his eventual discovery not in a history of deliberate concealment but in a life in which bodily privacy and ordinary social understanding allowed the question to remain unasked.

Medical Discovery and Religious Crisis

The decisive examination came after Benítez was injured in an explosion in Baghdad and taken to hospital. It was the first time a doctor had fully examined him. Once the medical facts were explained, he was appalled; in his recollection, darkness seemed to descend, and he feared that his whole life had been lived in mortal sin. The diagnosis therefore did more than supply clinical information: it overturned the religious meaning he had attached to his identity and vocation.

The proposed treatment was surgery to correct a fusion of the labia majora and minora, together with a clitoropexy. Benítez says he considered it and prayed for guidance, but decided against it. When he later explains his choice to Lomeli, he describes the clinical procedures plainly, without treating the possibility of surgery as an answer that settled the spiritual question. The distinction between describing a bodily condition and declaring that it must be corrected is central to the exchange.

A Decision About the Body and Vocation

After learning the medical facts, Benítez offered his resignation to the late Pope without giving the reason. The late Pope invited him to Rome to discuss it and tried to dissuade him from leaving. Benítez eventually disclosed the reason; the two prayed together for guidance. He says that he initially decided to undergo surgery and leave the ministry, then changed his mind the night before he was due to fly to Switzerland.

His reversal rests on a specific theological judgment: he was what God had made him, and correcting that handiwork seemed to him more sinful than leaving his body as it was. He cancelled the appointment and returned to Baghdad. The choice thus joined two questions that had first appeared inseparable—whether to alter his body and whether to continue as a priest—without making surgery the necessary price of religious service.

Disclosure and the Meaning of Acceptance

When Lomeli asks what Benítez’s situation is, Benítez answers that it is unchanged from the time he was ordained, made an archbishop, and created a cardinal. He stresses that there had been no treatment in Geneva. His reply makes continuity, rather than a newly acquired status, the point: the medical discovery had altered his knowledge of himself, but, in his account, had not changed the person who had served in the Church.

Benítez also looks back on his priestly work, which was mainly among women suffering in some way, and suggests that it may have reflected his natural state unconsciously. He is careful to describe this as a retrospective possibility, not as something he understood at the time. The distinction matters: his ministry is not presented as proof that his body had secretly dictated his life, but as one connection he can consider only after learning what doctors found.

The late Pope ultimately left the decision about surgery and ministry to Benítez. Benítez says that the late Pope made him a cardinal in pectore with full knowledge of who he was. That confidential appointment, revealed in the conversation, gives institutional consequence to the principle of bodily acceptance: Benítez’s place in the Church had not depended on correcting his body or concealing the truth from the late Pope. His account does not erase the shock of diagnosis or the seriousness of his deliberation. Instead, it ends with a chosen understanding of the body as something received from God, not an error that medicine must necessarily repair.