Dignitas infinita, the new DDF declaration on human dignity and various contemporary practices that threaten it, reads mostly like a document that reaffirms traditional prohibitions—sometimes quite sternly so, such as in the section on “gender theory,” which section I think is thorny in some ways but don’t really want to complain about at length. There are, however, several points at which the document shows doctrinal development on one subject or another.
This begins with the definition of dignity itself, which proposes a fourfold distinction between ontological, moral, social, and existential forms of dignity (7-9). We often hear people talk about “death with dignity” in contexts involving euthanasia, or about morally compromised people “lacking dignity” in various ways, and this is a way of speaking that has always bothered me. People who talk about things like this would seem to be implying that there is life without dignity, which would seem to make “dignity” a close cousin of respectability and pride, rather than something that all people have as a birthright. Dignitas infinita addresses this head-on regarding euthanasia (51), but has already provided the theoretical means for filling this gap: there is ontological dignity, and there are other kinds of dignity that can express the demands of our shared ontological dignity more or less well. I would submit that this is the document’s strongest teaching, and might go down as one of the most fruitful legacies of the Fernández DDF.
Dignitas infinita mostly avoids language of “intrinsic evil,” instead focusing on various threats to, risks to, or attacks on its account of dignity. I don’t think this is to be wondered at; preferred formulations for theology do change. The Apostles didn’t use terminology like “intrinsic evil,” or like “ontological dignity” for that matter, and even in our own time we have once-common expressions like “parvity of matter” and “objective mortal sin” that now see very little use other than from the mouth and pen of Cardinal Robert McElroy. This is development of doctrine in a fairly pure sense: consistent theology being expressed in new language, in this case perhaps because the way Catholic moral theology uses the word “intrinsic” is widely misunderstood.
The document quotes (34) a passage the Vatican II constitution Gaudium et spes that Pope St. John Paul II also quoted in Veritatis splendor, understandably since the passage in Gaudium et spes is itself a long list of affronts to human dignity. Yet while the Council fathers used the term “infamies indeed” and John Paul II used “intrinsic evils,” today’s DDF describes these practices as “grave violations.” Dignitas infinita also adds the death penalty to this list, whereas it’s generally accepted that “intrinsic evil” is inapposite in that case; perhaps there’s also a development in the exact understanding of moral offense here that needs to be further teased out? Part of the issue with how the “intrinsic” language tended to be understood was that people thought it was an intensifier, when it in fact simply means that an act cannot be fully justified by the circumstances. Perhaps the DDF finds this question less interesting than it has in the recent past; indeed, what are discussed here are phenomena mostly not treated as discrete “acts” at all but as widespread practices or patterns of cultural behavior. It’s hard to say that, for instance, cyberbullying (61-62) or mistreating disabled people (53-54) are or are not “intrinsically evil acts,” because “acts” would not seem to be the right category for them at all.
There is a work-in-progress feeling to the sections on “gender theory” (55-59) and “sex change” (60), which others have noted. Here I’ll highlight a curiously timid quality to the condemnation of the latter. The sentence “It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception” contains two qualifiers that the other denunciations in the document lack. “As a rule”—di norma in Italian—almost gives the sense that a door is being left ajar on purpose, since this is a relatively new set of considerations and there might be something being overlooked. There’s some development from the recent past in the one exception or counterexample that Dignitas infinita spells out, too: surgeries undertaken to “resolve” intersex conditions are described as a choice made by those affected, whereas the then-Congregation for Catholic Education’s “Male and Female He Created Them” instruction from 2019 contemplates and tacitly accepts these surgeries being coerced. One also sees a development in the fact that Dignitatis infinita, remarkably, mentions homosexuality exclusively to condemn the fact that it is still criminalized in much of the world (55).
My focus on points of development here isn’t unique to me; the document itself traces a history, or a historiography perhaps, of Catholic thought on human dignity (10-16). Much of it is a familiar story: Dignitas infinita’s historiography starts from the Bible, especially the prophetic books and the Gospel of Matthew but not excluding the rest of Scripture. From here it moves through the patristic teaching of “the unique role of the human person in creation,” medieval theology on the person, and “the Christian humanism of the Renaissance,” to the beginnings of modern secular philosophy: “Even in the writings of such modern thinkers as Descartes and Kant, who challenged some of the foundations of traditional Christian anthropology, one can still strongly perceive echoes of Revelation” (13). “The Church’s Magisterium,” the declaration concludes in its section on current understandings of dignity, “progressively developed an ever-greater understanding of the meaning of human dignity, along with its demands and consequences, until it arrived at the recognition that the dignity of every human being prevails beyond all circumstances” (16).
The declaration returns to and summarizes this historiography at the end of the subsequent section: “At the same time, human history shows clear progress in understanding human dignity and freedom, albeit not without shadows and risks of regression. Such advancement in understanding human dignity is demonstrated by the fact that there is an increasing desire to eradicate racism, slavery, and the marginalization of women, children, the sick, and people with disabilities. This aspiration has been bolstered under the influence of the Christian faith, which continues to be a ferment, even in increasingly secularized societies. However, the arduous journey of advancing human dignity remains far from completion.” (32)
People should read Dignitas infinita with a view to tracing these threads, interpreting and understanding the declaration’s analysis of them, and thus coming to understand more clearly how doctrine develops in general. I can think of few documents from the Francis pontificate that have demonstrated this principle more overtly.
Photograph by Bengt A. Lundberg, from Wikimedia Commons.
Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander and now lives in Upstate New York. A lifelong fascination with religious ritual led him into first the Episcopal Church and then the Catholic Church. An alumnus of Boston University School of Theology and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution, he is unmarried and works in the nonprofit sector. He writes at Silicate Siesta.
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