Jun 19 Fri
Can our human dignity be re-defined?
Human dignity, in Catholic teaching, is the essential, irreducible worth of every human person, grounded in the fact that each person is created in the image of God and called to communion with Him—so that a person is a “someone,” not merely a “something.”
Ontological dignity is that which corresponds to the person "by the mere fact of existing", and "subsists beyond all circumstances". Beyond all circumstances: it can also be assumed, beyond the criteria of our time. Rome wrote an entire document to prevent dignity from being redefined, and two years later, some propose to redefine it in a journalistic after-dinner conversation, as if recommending updating the furniture.
Hopefully, "redefining dignity with the criteria of our time" may mean only finding new words for an old truth, translating into the language of the present a content that is not touched, refreshing pastoral intervention without altering dogma.
I would subscribe to this hypothesis.
Contemporary anthropological relativism dissolves the family, renames abortion as a right, and euthanasia as compassion, and decrees that sex is a feeling.
They disguise their intentions with a whole rhetoric of concord: to overcome polarization, to bet on the common good, to seek common ground, to speak better of ourselves. Who could oppose it?
And yet it is precisely under that music of good feelings that smuggling travels safely, because no one searches the luggage of those who smile. We are invited not to tense, and those who notice the problem are automatically aligned with the tense. We are asked to meet, and to point out a doctrinal imprecision suddenly seems an act of hostility.
This is how the device works: an uncomfortable truth is reclassified as bad manners, and a theological objection as a lack of the spirit of dialogue. Chesterton, who saw all this coming when he was still a child, wrote that there would come a time when we would have to draw the sword to prove that trees are green. We are in that time, except that now drawing the sword is considered, in itself, a form of tension.
Raise your gaze: the motto of the Pope’s trip to Spain. A good motto; I hope it does not become, for some, an invitation never to go into the details, which is where the devil dwells, and also, sometimes, the truth.
Human dignity is not better contemplated from above, in the abstract, redefined according to the taste of the century. We must recognize human dignity down below, in the concrete migrant person, in the concrete unborn, and in the concrete elderly, whom human dignity protects, not because public opinion has decided it, but because it was already there, though the world, our world, as usual, has arrived late to the truth.
Still, people can diminish their dignity by not obeying their conscience. Catholic moral teaching also highlights that people can also flourish in dignity in the practical sense, because dignity is accomplished by seeking truth, obeying conscience, resisting sin, practicing virtue, and repenting.
Pic: Abraham and Isaac.