By Ryan LeBlanc
If there is one foundational principle for all Catholic moral teaching, it is the dignity of every human person. On the one hand, it is a simple concept: each of us exists because of a loving thought of God.
In another way, trying to work out life in a confusing world, the concept of dignity can seem to stretch over several different uses of the word. Is it true that we can lose our dignity? What is happening when we experience “undignified” situations?
To begin with, let’s examine the core of the Catholic idea of dignity: God creates man and woman in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27). In the love that they live together, our first parents bear the ‘stamp’ or image of the one who created the entire universe.
Though humanity rejects God through sin, Jesus becoming human shows us that the dignity of the divine image has not been lost – he sees and embraces human dignity to himself. Finally, the Resurrection points towards the definitive plan for human dignity – in the Spirit, we are becoming more like God, being refined for the goodness in store for us called Eternal Life.
What each of these mysteries – Creation, Incarnation and Resurrection – point towards is a kind of essential, foundational dignity (the classic word is ontological). Simply put, it means that simply existing as a human being is beautiful, glorious, worthy, valuable, precious, awesome – in a way that makes violating that dignity always wrong. We are all worthy of love simply because we exist. Nothing will earn this dignity, and nothing will make it disappear.
Personally, this is where my confusion often begins, because I have found myself in undignified circumstances. It is common to see social situations which seem stripped of dignity. If human dignity is always present, what is happening when dignity is lacking in the moment?
Another sense of the word dignity has to do with describing what we do with our freedom. When a person takes their freedom to choose and gives their whole life out of love to their spouse, and receives their spouse’s free gift in return, our hearts rejoice to see such a dignified action. When another person freely sacrifices some good of theirs for the good of others, we get the sense that this is human dignity in action.
On the contrary, we all know that some choices, some free actions, are undignified. Selfish greed, thoughtless neglect, violent wrath all lack dignity, though they certainly originate from humans who do not lose their created dignity. It’s helpful to distinguish between the dignity of the individual and the moral dignity of their actions – but they are still connected! As the dignified image of the creative, generous and loving God, our actions become undignified when they contradict who we really are – who we have been created to be.
Having identified moral dignity as the kind of dignity that does or does not emerge from our essential dignity, how else might we describe human dignity in our world?
When we see images of hunger, violence, oppression, and neglect against human beings, I think we all have a sense that something has been lost. It is not that victims have lost their essential dignity, but rather that we understand that we have failed as a human family to honour social dignity. We tend to feel that something is wrong when we see human suffering, whether through poverty, disaster or injustice. Surely, witnessing fellow human beings scrounging through garbage for their basic needs cannot be described as dignified.
Unfortunately, we can fall into avoiding or scapegoating when confronted by the difficult emotions evoked by a lack of social dignity. Again, those who suffer on the peripheries do not forfeit their essential dignity, but the human community can fail to express and uphold human dignity. Thus, human persons can end up in undignified situations, which move from unfortunate to shameful exactly because the collective society has not cared for every person as they deserved.
God continually invites us to imagine and believe into existence a human society in which every person is cared for, provided what they need to thrive, and whose existence and contributions are joyfully received and honoured. This vision can certainly be said to be filled with a social dignity.
If we are honest with our experience of being human, however, there’s another factor that we need to consider. It is true that a person can have all their material and economic needs met, and yet feel worthless. It is true that a person might not have committed serious sin, and yet feel cut off from any sense of purpose or meaning. The inverse is true as well. Maybe we know someone whose dignity was utterly unrecognized and abused by those around them, but carried themselves with a real and tangible confidence in themselves. It’s even possible to meet someone caught in patterns of sin, yet sure of God’s love for them. There’s a dignity in that, which our circumstances and actions don’t always determine, and yet does seem conditional.
I would describe this last sense of the word dignity as a kind of inner sense and experience of one’s own essential dignity. Sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it’s not. The good news of Jesus Christ is simply this exact message that we each need to hear: that I, myself, specifically me, am loved and valued. The interior experience of one’s own dignity can be called existential dignity. Of course, this kind of dignity is another awareness and expression of the reality that every human person has inviolable, inalienable, inherent dignity.
In all my confusing and undignified worldly moments, these distinctions can help me sort out where my path as a beloved child of God needs to lead, in my personal freedom, my social relationships, and in my own affirmation of God’s word to me.
This reflection consists of my takeaways from the document “Dignitas Infinita – On Human Dignity” issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued 08.04.2024. You can read it for yourself here.
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Ryan LeBlanc is a Teacher Chaplain at E.D. Feehan Catholic High School in Saskatoon and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Family.