Dignitas Infinata

 

- The Vatican has today released this document on human dignity, addressing the personal freedom and equality of all human beings. 

- It’s excellent on the broad philosophical and moral beliefs and traditions that underpin these critical realities in today’s world, a world that too often ignores them. 

- However its positions on the equality and rights of women, while well stated in theory, are undermined in practice by the Catholic church itself. Even the sexist language of using ‘he’ to refer to all humans, plainly gives it away. Arguing that women should have the same rights as men in every sphere of life, work and society, yet continuing to deny them the priesthood, is hypocrisy writ large.

- Denying any right to abortion from the moment of ‘conception’ (a constantly used and sacred word), and entirely ignoring modern biological science in determining personhood, is profoundly ignorant. Abortion and euthanasia in this document are in the same category as genocide. Artificial insemination is also outlawed. Referring to ‘a human being in the initial phase of its existence’ is a constant mantra. 

- The discussion on gender diversity is also profoundly ignorant. Cliches about bipolarity at birth to be revered throughout human life are indulged in, and no attention given to contemporary academic thinking at all. ‘…any sex change operation, as a general rule, runs the risk of undermining the unique dignity that the person has received from the moment of conception’. 

- Interestingly, homosexuality is not mentioned in the document at all. Neither is gay marriage. In fact it says ‘…every person, regardless of his or her sexual orientation, must be respected in his or her dignity and welcomed with respect, taking care to avoid every sign of unjust discrimination’. 

- Thankfully the document abandons the age-old belief in a possible ‘just war’. The logic of a ‘legitimate war must be left behind’. 

- The rights of migrants and refugees are also deeply respected. ‘…every migrant is a human person who, as such, possesses inalienable fundamental rights that must be respected by everyone and in every situation’. 

- So there is both good and bad in this document - profoundly typical of a church mired in the believed rectitude of its centuries of history.