The expressed intent of the recent declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is to “illuminate different facets of human dignity that might be obscured in many people’s consciousness” (Dignitas Infinita, Presentation). To the extent that the Declaration—though not intended to be comprehensive—selects topics that are indeed heavily “obscured” today, it succeeds.
But it falls disappointingly short of illuminating them in an integral and wholistic way.
The main reason, I would argue, is that it fails to remind us—at least in a rudimentary way—of the very core of Catholic social teaching: the family. By “family,” I don’t mean the vaguely defined “human family” (cf. DI 14, 51, 62, 66), but rather “the original cell of social life” (CCC 2207) constituted by “a man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children” (CCC 2202). It is troubling that a document devoted to recalling “fundamental principles and theoretical premises, with the goal of offering important clarifications that can help avoid frequent confusion that surrounds the use of the term ‘dignity’” (DI, Presentation), fails to once reference the most eloquent magisterial pronouncement on the family in recent times, John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio (1981).
In that landmark document, we read that “not infrequently ideas and solutions which are very appealing but which obscure in varying degrees the truth and the dignity of the human person, are offered to the men and women of today, in their sincere and deep search for a response to the important daily problems that affect their married and family life” (FC, 4).
In other words, Saint John Paul presciently connected the obfuscation of consciousness subsequently referred to in Dignitas Infinita with the most vulnerable victim of this obfuscation, the family.
The problem with Dignitas Infinita lies not in its content, but in its need of a stronger axis around which to discuss the main threats to human dignity that it lists, and no one has understood that axis better than Pope John Paul II.
The most natural place to have addressed, however briefly, the centrality of the family in society would have been in the subsection entitled “The Relational Structure of the Human Person.” The document makes useful reference to John Paul II’s teaching in Evangelium Vitae that freedom is placed “at the service of the person and of his fulfillment through the gift of self and openness to others; but when freedom is made absolute in an individualistic way, it is emptied of its original content, and its very meaning and dignity are contradicted” (DI, 26; EV, 19).
But the Declaration could have easily added that the primary victim of this erroneous view of freedom is indeed the family, as John Paul II had already argued in Familiaris Consortio:
At the root of these negative phenomena (against the family), there frequently lies a corruption of the idea and the experience of freedom, conceived not as a capacity for realizing the truth of God’s plan for marriage and the family, but as an autonomous power of self-affirmation, often against others, for one’s own selfish well-being. (FC, 6)
Even more troubling is that this very subsection then strategically moves directly from the aforementioned misconception of freedom to the relationship between humans and nature, completely sidestepping the family. It rather quotes Pope Francis’s assertion in Laudate Deum (2023) that “it is not a matter of indifference to us that so many species are disappearing and that the climate crisis endangers the life of many other beings” (DI, 26; LD, 63).
How can a magisterial document with a subheading consisting of three short paragraphs dedicated to the “relational structure of the human person” not even mention the family?
One of those paragraphs—consisting of a single sentence—begs for completion with at least some affirmation that the most privileged locus of learning how to relate to others is the family. Paragraph 27 of the Declaration asserts that “human dignity also encompasses the capacity, inherent in human nature, to assume obligations vis-à-vis others.” How hard could it have been to add that “the family must help man to discern his own vocation and to accept responsibility in the search for greater justice, educating him from the beginning in interpersonal relationships” (FC, 2)?
To make matters worse, when Dignitas Infinita does mention the family, it tends to do so as a potentially negative influence on the acknowledgment of human dignity (cf. DI, 8 and 37). For example, it asserts that “violent family environments” may cause people to “struggle to live with peace, joy, and hope” and “drive people to experience their life conditions as ‘undignified’” (DI, 8). Fair and true enough, but the Declaration passes over a golden opportunity to reaffirm that “the discovery of and obedience to the plan of God on the part of the conjugal and family community must take place in ‘togetherness,’ through the human experience of love between husband and wife, between parents and children, lived in the Spirit of Christ” (FC, 54).
“Togetherness” is the key term for a Christian understanding of marriage and family, but you wouldn’t guess it from reading Dignitas Infinita alone, for there is not a single explicit reference to fatherhood. This is glaringly evident in the subsection on “Surrogacy,” which, according to the Declaration, “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs” (DI, 48).
But what about the father? The closest the subsection gets to mentioning any violation of the father’s dignity is in its acknowledgment that “the dignity of the human person also entails recognizing every dimension of the dignity of the conjugal union and of human procreation” (Ibid., emphasis mine). But as Familiaris Consortio makes clear, the dignity of the conjugal union and of human procreation is not simply tacked on to the dignity of a child. Rather, the conjugal union—the proper locus of human procreation—is the very matrix within which the child most fully discloses its human dignity. Another way of stating the issue is to join the Declaration in acknowledging that “a child is always a gift” (Ibid.) but to ask a question the Declaration ignores: a gift to whom?
This hole could easily have been filled with a simple reference to paragraph 14 of Familiaris Consortio (“Children, the Precious Gift of Marriage”), which states that the “gift” of conjugal love makes them (i.e., the couple) capable of the “greatest possible gift, the gift by which they become cooperators with God for giving life to a new person.” John Paul II continues:
Thus the couple, while giving themselves to one another, give not just themselves but also the reality of children, who are a living reflection of their love, a permanent sign of conjugal unity and a living and inseparable synthesis of their being a father and a mother.” (FC, 14, emphasis mine)
In short, there are two layers of giftedness that underlie the gift of children, both of which involve both the mother and the father: the “gift” that each member of the couple makes of him or herself in the conjugal act, and the “gift” which is the “new responsibility” the couple receives when they become parents. The moral distortedness of surrogacy lies not only in depriving the child of its biological mother’s womb, but in depriving the child of serving fully as a “visible sign of the very love of God, ‘from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named’” (Ibid.).
How quickly we have forgotten Familiaris Consortio. How quickly we have forgotten the wonder and joy that inevitably accompany the suffering and self-sacrifice required for spouses to give themselves to one another and open themselves generously to the gift of children.
In all fairness, the Declaration does restate clearly that the ideology of gender theory “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family” (DI, 59; cf. Amoris Laetitia, 56). But it is precisely this “anthropological basis of the family” that needs to be reiterated in the face of the growing threats to human dignity identified in Dignitas Infinita.
For all the Declaration’s merits, what really needs fleshing out is the inseverable connection between individual human dignity and the dignity of the family. A Declaration on that would be most timely and welcome.
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Gallagher insightfully asks: “How can a magisterial document [Dignitias Infinita, DI] with a subheading consisting of three short paragraphs dedicated to the ‘relational structure of the human person’ not even mention the family?”
Might the answer be that once the dignity of the person is omnivorously mistranslated (deliberately by word-merchant Cardinal Fernandez?) as “infinite” rather than “immense,” then mention of the irreducible “family” becomes superfluous. (Better instead to airbrush very complex prudential judgments as regarding immigration and capital punishment, and the also-infinite high stakes of irregular warfare, i.e., both just and unjust at the same time).
Moreover, the continued existence of Fiducia Supplicans (FS) simply would be too obvious—with its blessing no longer of only, shall we say, regular(!) “marriage,” but now of “irregular couples.” Especially including homosexual pairings. FS’s delicate carve-out from polyglot “gender theory” as now correctly rejected by DI.
Families are not mentioned in DI because FS continues in tandem and without correction or retraction…
The evolutionary segregation of “concrete” realities from “abstract” ideologies—and even from integral truth (as simply another abstract idea): “time is greater than space; realities are more important than ideas” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013).
Any reference to Familiaris Consortio (FC) would have to deal with the departure of Fiducia Supplicans (FS) from FC Section IV–especially nn. 79-84: the irregular situations of trial marriages, de facto free unions, Catholics in civil marriages, separated or divorced who have not remarried, and divorced who have remarried.
Cardinal Fernandez has said that he is aware of Veritatis Splendor (VS), but that he doesn’t think it went far enough. With its sorta blessing of “irregular couples”—as a cover for adding homosexual couples—does FS presume to mount FC’s morally sound goal posts on situational surf boards?
Very good point indeed, Mr. Gallagher.
But it’s not surprising that the documents issued by Bergoglio’s Dark Vatican are lacking.
Because what they and their pontiff are most in need of is Spiritus Sanctu.
“Dignitas Infinita” … apparently there is indeed no end to the infinity of efforts — documents, interviews and theatrics in which this pontificate is willing to engage to alter the perennial Magisterium and conform itself and us to world. Stuck in the sixties and the desire to be “relevant” {remember that one?] one perceives them and their constituents to be in pathological protracted adolescence.
It is a mortification to behold and to be perceived as being aligned with such nonsense by virtue of being a Roman Catholic. We have become a scandal.
Mr. Gallagher has REVEALED AN EMPTINESS in DI, and his revelation indicates the disintegrated mentality of the author Cardinal Fernandez and his mentor the Pontiff Francis.
They are two men cut from the very same cloth, educated in the “decapitated-apostate-cult-of-the-spirit-of-vatican-2,” living inside the wasteland of the impoverishing “Peronist-police-state” of Argentina, and psychologically colonized by the ideology of “sexual-revolution-of-LGBTQ+.”
Because of this triple-crippling formation, they are incapable of speaking as prophets of Christ, because they do not have “the mind of Christ.” Because they are “Custodians-of-the-Cult-of-the-Decapitated-Body-of-Christ.
T h e y ? “cult of the Decapitated Body of Christ” Blasphemy! “Nothing is as treacherous as the hearts of men” The Head of the Body of Christ is the GODHEAD Jesus Christ who said that evil will never overcome the Catholic Apostolic Church ever!
Instead of raising up the Holy Church you people run off to make your own church and truth void of all charity and the Holy Spirit. Are you in the Church to raise her up, offering yourself up as penitent and sacrifice to draw the mercy of God on the Church for renewal of His Truth. Jesus will never surrender His Church, He can revive her with just one word and will if it pleases Him, and HE WILL!
Edith, I sincerely hope that the scales fall from the eyes of “you people.” Wake up and smell the rot. You are quite correct that “…evil will never overcome the Catholic Apostolic Church, ever!” But every pope is a fallible human, some better, more virtuous than others. Just because a person is pope does not render them above criticism. No, we cannot judge a man’s heart. That is the purview of God. But we can judge any man by his actions. If you cannot see the violence of Pope Francis’ actions, well I cannot explain it to you. I do appreciate your passion, however. I do.
Joseph, thank you for your reply – we need more honest dialogue. Chris is condemning the whole Church, not just Bergoglio. Not anyone should ever call the Holy Church decapitated of its head. That is an insult to Jesus Christ. I was among the first ones to complain about this Pope. Jesus revealed to me his evil intent at the time he visited the US, and by now it should be clear to everyone. But you cannot leave the Church because an elected pope went rogue. The Latin rite is a rite of many in the Church. It doesn’t change the fact that the “Traditionalists” are in disunity with the Church. I pray for unity of the Church everyday! God bless you!
Edith:
Please understand that I am not condemning the whole Church, I go to Mass every Sunday to worship the Holy Trinity, profess my faith in the Creed, including my belief in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I reject and condemn the regime of “Pontiff-Francis-and-Kasper-Fernandez-Hollerich-McCarrick-Gregory-Danneels-Wuerl-Rupnik-Grassi-Zanchetta-Martin-Grech-etc-etc-etc.”
These men are apostates and what Jesus called “false shepherds and thieves.”
The general and widespread apostasy inside the Church “leadership” and “bureaucratic establishment” is the subject of an essay by Fr. Robert Imbelli, entitled “No Decapitated Body.” (I have shared the link in another reply.)
In the essay, Imbelli writes that when a man rejects the authority of Christ and his apostles, and substitutes his own commands in place of the divine command, such men are in the preposterous and shamelessly arrogant position of trying to remove Christ as head of the Church, and offer themselves in the place of Christ. Fr. Imbellli writes that such men are laboring to for a different “Church,” desiring for themselves to possess “The Body of Christ” but without Christ as the Head of the Church. They want the Body, but not Christ. They are not only apostates, but they are (de facto) idolators.
So I am faithful to the Church, as were my mother and father, and I reject and condemn the false shepherds named above, all for the same reason: because that is the duty I owe to Jesus, the Head of The Body of Christ.
I welcome your comments and concerns, and I hope that this allays some of the trouble you felt when you read mu original comment.
Your friend in Christ,
Chris
Edith:
Here is the essay “No Decapitated Body,” by Fr. Robert Imbelli, on the current apostasy inside the Church.
https://stpaulcenter.com/02-nv-18-3-imbelli/
I welcome your comments.
Chris,
(!) You likely presumed we all had seen or read Fr. Imbelli’s essay at least once among the hundreds of times you posted it, but perhaps you should post the link one more time. Then maybe get ready to explain it, too, since there seem to be so many noisy locusts and much premature conclusion-jumping going around these days.
Meiron:
Imbelli’s essay “No Decapitatied Body.” The link:
https://stpaulcenter.com/02-nv-18-3-imbelli/
Chris,
(!) You likely presumed we all had seen or read Fr. Imbelli’s essay at least once among the hundreds of times you posted it, but perhaps you should post the link one more time. Then maybe get ready to explain it, too, since there seem to be many noisy locusts and much premature conclusion-jumping going around these days.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius11/p11casti.htm
Thank you, author Mr. Gallagher, for the insightful analysis of DI. You cogently argued that the family should have been obviously the stated focus of relationship by any wordsmith; the omission is glaring and appears intentional. And grateful for Meiron’s (et al.)’s specific research comments.
I spent the weekend pondering the 120+ points in FC; much gratitude to you, “ND” for the FC link! Worthy of considerable review as its application pertains to multiple areas of life.
Of timely note from 1981 is FC’s point #71: contraceptive/transgender surgeries are particularly evidently BANNED as mutilation of the temple God gifts purposefully functioning in each male and female person. Explains why leftists’ draconian laws BANNED CATHOLIC COUNSELING recently! 🙁 Lucifer’s $money for surgeries!
Thank you CWR for this forum; much Catholicism is presented and discussed by learned sources. Praying Truth continues to expose the serpent’s deceits!
The problem does lie within its content, far beyond the content you brought into the Light…see that its content, both by what it did say [via positiva], and didn’t say [via negativap, is a problem. Easter Mercy blessings!
Daniel Gallagher touches an underlying theological premise in DI, the category of relationship lately understood as Man defined in relation. “28. The difference between humans and all other living beings, which stands out thanks to the concept of dignity, should not lead us to forget the goodness of other creatures. Those beings exist not only for human utility but also possess a value of their own”.
Drift toward the excellence of relationship, implied homosexual relationship, is treated as preeminent, above other considerations. Gallagher’s thesis veers the excellence of relationship to the traditional family. On this he is insightful, underscoring the essence of any relationship that is conjugal or an attempt to imitate a male female conjugal relationship. On this point I posted the question on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body [see CWR ‘St John Paul II’s wisdom about person and sex for our anti-human age’ Deacon Delaney] and the emphasis on the sensual body in a seeming departure from focus on the spiritual nature of the male female conjugal act. “According to Dominican Fr Thomas Petri’s analysis in his treatise ‘Aquinas and the Theology of the Body’, he [John Paul II] values love over faith, and that love draws the person into a real ontological and psychological union with God”. He [Petri] also writes [see CWR ‘St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body’ Daniel Blackman 2016] that “the Theology of the Body could have been strengthened by further exploring how the spousal meaning of the body differs for men and women. Since John Paul does not spend time explaining the differences between men and women adequately in Theology of the Body, he does not spend time addressing the structure of the family”.
My issue was the emphasis on the physical sensual nature of human love to the detriment of the spiritual end. Petri argues this is implied by John Paul yet not explicit, to which I agree. Whereas if that dimension of the conjugal relationship were addressed in John Paul’s Theology of the Body it would strengthen objection to the value of relationship perse as a preface for the dignity of same sex relations.
“Chris in Maryland” comes close to the depressive root of DI that traverses even secular culture. Satan’s avalanche of shame (after leading billions into mortal sin) suffocates truth under a mass of denial and evasion. Moreover where truth is maligned, mercy is also contorted into superficial earthly empathy absent agape. The word “dignity” itself is co-opted by a darkened intellect to mean highly esteemed “as is.” One could tag on “no matter what one does” (unless a politically—ideologically—disfavored individual.) Thus unorthodox SSA groups like Dignity cannot see the deceit in their brand. The Hamas atrocities are neutralized by perceived gross disrespect by Israel. The errant immigrant is excused for criminal transgressions. Politicians reverence the environment more than innocent life in the womb.
No document reinforcing the inherent dignity of any person, regardless of carefully crafted language, will remedy what is actually flight from sin, need for contrition and good confession.
Patricia:
The theme of “decapitating the Body of Christ” comes from the essay by Fr. Robert Imbelli, in the journal Nova et Vetera, entitled “No Decapitated Body,” about the widespread and intentional apostasy in the Church.
The link to the essay is here:
https://stpaulcenter.com/02-nv-18-3-imbelli/
While ontological dignity belongs to every man, moral indignity obscures the power and clarity of spiritual gifts. Card. Fernandez attested that it took some five years for his Dignity document to promulgate. In 1988, JPII squeezed Mulieris Dignitatem between Redemptoris Mater in 1987 and Redemptoris Custos in 1989. One cannot help but notice a disadvantage in comparison. A few more years in the continuum where not only dignity but also time is infinite may yield better fruit for those with obscure spiritual gifts.
Mulieris Dignitatum, beautifully addresses much about the male-female “unity” of “family.”
(From Section 7): “To be human means to be called to interpersonal communion. The text of Genesis 2:18-25 shows that marriage is the first and, in a sense, the fundamental dimension of this call. But it is not the only one. The whole of human history unfolds within the context of this call. In this history, on the basis of the principle of mutually being “for” the other, in interpersonal “communion”, there develops in humanity itself, in accordance with God’s will, the integration of what is “masculine” and what is “feminine”.
Also from Section 7:
“The image and likeness of God in man, created as man and woman (in the analogy that can be presumed between Creator and creature), thus also expresses the “unity of the two” in a common humanity. This “unity of the two”, which is a sign of interpersonal communion, shows that the creation of man is also marked by a certain likeness to the divine communion (“communio”). This likeness is a quality of the personal being of both man and woman, and is also a call and a task….
In the “unity of the two”, man and woman are called from the beginning not only to exist “side by side” or “together”, but they are also called to exist mutually “one for the other”.
Section 8: Although it is not possible to attribute human qualities to the eternal generation of the Word of God, and although the divine fatherhood does not possess “masculine” characteristics in a physical sense, we must nevertheless seek in God the absolute model of all “generation” among human beings. This would seem to be the sense of the Letter to the Ephesians: “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (3:14-15). All “generating” among creatures finds its primary model in that generating which in God is completely divine, that is, spiritual. All “generating” in the created world is to be likened to this absolute and uncreated model. Thus every element of human generation which is proper to man, and every element which is proper to woman, namely human “fatherhood” and “motherhood”, bears within itself a likeness to, or analogy with the divine “generating” and with that “fatherhood” which in God is “totally different”, that is, completely spiritual and divine in essence; whereas in the human order, generation is proper to the “unity of the two”: both are “parents”, the man and the woman alike.”
BUT HEY! While ontological dignity belongs to every man, moral indignity obscures the power and clarity of spiritual gifts. Fernandez has attested to how long (5 years) his DI document took. Perhaps he needs a few more years in the continuum where not only dignity but time too is infinite.
Read together, does “Mulieris Dignitatem” (1988) possibly complete and relieve the lack of explicit focus on spirituality in “The Theology of the Body” (1979-85, which is about the “body”)? The opposite outcome—when read together—of Fiducia Supplicans (FS, which is about irregular “couples”) as it contradicts the [not “infinite,” but only transcendent] dignity of the human person in “Dignitatis Infinita (DI)”?
Any deepening offered through encyclicals, declarations and letters merits our conviction only when it does not actually contradict the Magisterium of all that has come before. It’s almost as if DI lingered for five years so that FS could be slipped a few months in front as a “concrete” exemption from DI with its focus on the “abstract” ideology of “gender theory.”
It used to be that the concrete (!), inborn, and universal natural law and moral absolutes were part of the Church’s foundation in moral theology. And, according to the unmentioned (“backwardist?”) Veritatis Splendor (VS, 1993), they still are!
And, are made explicitly so…
“The Church is no way the author or the arbiter of this [‘moral’] norm” (VS, n. 95). AND,”[t]his is the first time, in fact, that the Magisterium of the Church has set forth in detail the fundamental elements of this [‘moral’] teaching, and presented the principles for the pastoral discernment necessary in practical and cultural situations which are complex and even crucial” (VS, n. 115).
In 2024 is Cardinal Fernandez over thirty years out of date?
Yes, the cardinal’s space-time continuum is so whacked, I’m looking to see black holes of distant galaxies being named after him, at some point in the future-past.
I don’t know that I’d characterize Theology of the Body as bereft of spirituality. I think its being written at the height of the first wave of the sexual revolution, with increasing numbers of Catholics divorcing and contracepting, could be a reason for the focus. Also, John of the Cross’s spousal depictions of God’s (trinitarian) love for humanity were attractions for Wotyla as the spousal depiction applied also to the unity of persons in one God. We are, as God created us, ’embodied’ creatures, with man created alone but followed soon with woman creatively ‘taken’
from his matter, bone ‘from’ his bone. TOB notes that God did not differentiate any other part of animal creation by sex, but the human masculine-feminine pair are described more as a unity as they were described, from the beginning, in Genesis.
I’ve only read sections and scanned the rest. The index for “Theology of the Body” has this entry (among others): “The body has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” [God’s mystery]
If you have the Pauline 2006 edition, Prof. Michael Waldstein (UND and member of JPII’s Pontifical Council for the Family) has a brilliant 120+ page Introduction which goes into exquisite detail about JPII’s thinking and philosophy underpinning the work. The work itself is quite spectacular, I think, and again, not bereft of spirituality. One entire section or chapter is on conjugal spirituality, another on Sacrament and mystery and another on ‘purity as life according to the spirit.’ Other chapters focus on after-effects of the fall. None good except for the Christ-given gift: redemption of the body. There is that word ‘body’ again.
Regarding Tucho and his abstract concretions, I leave him to you as our resident expert. I don’t trust the tree wherein dwells a serpent. Do you?
Happy continuing Easter Season!