Yesterday, the Vatican released “Dignitas Infinita” — a document affirming the infinite dignity intrinsic to each human being.
But do not be fooled by its Latin title — the document is a blockbuster.
In the United States, at least, yesterday’s news feed was inundated with tips, memes, and photos related to the total solar eclipse that swept across the country. The eclipse, uh, eclipsed the Vatican document — but the effects of the latter will be felt for years to come, far and wide.
“Dignitas Infinita” covers nearly every hot topic of the day. The text makes a firm and unrelenting stand against abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, gender ideology, surrogacy, and sex change.
On abortion, the document decried the acceptance of the practice “a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense.”
Especially in the case of abortion, there is a widespread use of ambiguous terminology, such as ‘interruption of pregnancy,’ which tends to hide abortion’s true nature and to attenuate its seriousness in public opinion. . . . But no word has the power to change the reality of things: procured abortion is the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out, of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth.
Under a section titled “Gender Theory,” the document skewers the militant gender ideology that seeks to eliminate sexual differences from society, including “the anthropological basis of the family.”
It thus becomes unacceptable that “some ideologies of this sort, which seek to respond to what are at times understandable aspirations, manage to assert themselves as absolute and unquestionable, even dictating how children should be raised. It needs to be emphasized that ‘biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated.” Therefore, all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.
When discussing sex change, the text affirms that the body is dignified in its particularity, especially “in its sexed condition.”
It is in the body that each person recognizes himself or herself as generated by others, and it is through their bodies that men and women can establish a loving relationship capable of generating other persons. Teaching about the need to respect the natural order of the human person, Pope Francis affirmed that “creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.” It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.
Many on the left bemoaned the stubbornly traditional tilt of the document. Wasn’t Pope Francis supposed to bring the Catholic Church into the new millennium? Isn’t it time for those Catholic holdouts to catch up with everyone else?
Nope. The church remains fiercely reticent to embrace false fads.
What the document (and, more broadly, the Catholic Church) gets right is that all the issues raised within are interconnected. Using the standard of intellectual and moral consistency, one cannot support surrogacy and oppose abortion. One cannot support physician-assisted suicide and oppose sex-change surgeries.
The unifying principle, which stands against the above-mentioned practices, supplies the document with its title: human dignity, rightly understood. The text uplifts the “sublime dignity of the human person, who stands above all things and whose rights and duties are universal and inviolable.” Each person, regardless of sex, developmental stage, or ability, is endowed with sacred worth.
At the same time “Dignitas Infinita” was released, Donald Trump made a statement on abortion that lacked the moral clarity of the former. Trump appealed to democratic pragmatism as the best arbiter of such matters, calling for the states to vote and for all to accept the results. (It seems the former president has acquired a newfound confidence in the electoral process.)
As the Right has seen for decades, the “culture war” steams toward failure when pulled away from its philosophical roots. If conservatives continue to champion individual preference — rather than human dignity — as the guiding light in matters of bodily integrity, we should surrender now.
Only through a firm commitment to human dignity can conservatives fight for a humane future.