A Document on Dignity?

It's Time for a Defense of the Development of Doctrine

Tucked away in Gerard O’Connell’s reporting for America on an address by Pope Francis to the plenary assembly of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), the Vatican’s doctrinal office, was the news that the DDF is preparing a new document on the topic of dignity. Although Francis’s remarks on the dicastery’s recent document opening the door to blessings for same-sex couples, Fiducia Supplicans, generated the headlines, according to O’Connell:

[T]urning to the topic of “dignity” and the defense of human dignity, Pope Francis recalled that the dicastery “is working on a document on this subject.” He said: “I hope that it [the document] will help us, as a Church, to always be close to all those who, without fanfare, in concrete daily life, fight and personally pay the price for defending the rights of those who are disregarded.” He expressed the hope that “in the face of present-day attempts to eliminate or ignore others, we may prove capable of responding with a new vision of fraternity and social friendship that will not remain at the level of words.”

America has learned that the dicastery has been working on the document on human dignity for about five years, and various versions of the texts have been sent back for redrafting. A source said its publication is not on the near horizon.

Even if the document is not “on the near horizon,” this is still exciting news for theologians for a number of reasons. For one, it is intriguing that the document has been in the works for five years, which means it was begun under the auspices of Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, S.J., who preceded the current prefect of the DDF, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández. The lengthy drafting process is in sharp contrast to the relatively swift process for writing Fiducia Supplicans, which surely only began after Fernández’s appointment last July (it’s hard to believe Ladaria would have begun the work on Fiducia Supplicans after producing a document forbidding the blessing of same-sex unions only two years earlier).

Second, it is only rarely that the dicastery issues documents dealing with Catholic social teaching, or as the Vatican has preferred to call it since John Paul II’s pontificate, Catholic social doctrine. If one excludes issues related to bioethics, I can only think of four documents touching on Catholic social teaching since the creation of the modern Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope Paul VI in 1965: the two instructions on liberation theology, Libertatis Nuntius in 1984 and Libertatis Conscientia in 1986; a 2002 doctrinal note on some questions regarding the participation of Catholics in political life; and Oeconomicae et Pecuniariae Quaestiones, a 2018 document on the global and economic financial system co-written with the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Of course, the social encyclicals regularly produced by the popes give scholars and teachers plenty to work with, but it is still noteworthy when the doctrinal office steps in to offer guidance or clarify an issue.

Most importantly, however, the topic of the upcoming document is quite significant. I would propose that the development of the doctrine of human dignity at the Second Vatican Council and afterwards is one of the most important, if not the most important, shifts in the modern Church.

The theologian Bernard Brady has traced the development in the Church’s understanding of dignity, in particular contrasting the traditional Thomistic understanding of the term with that which has emerged in contemporary magisterial teaching. For St. Thomas Aquinas, dignity is conditional or relative; one’s dignity is based on one’s social station, as well as one’s virtuous or vicious behavior. In a theological sense, one’s dignity depends on the extent to which one is living a life infused by grace. By way of contrast, in the modern sense adopted by the Church’s Magisterium, dignity is unconditional; it is rooted in our creation in the image of God, is equally possessed by all persons, and is inalienable. I think this history needs further fleshing out, and I suspect the Franciscan (and particularly Scotist) tradition may have played an important role, but that’s a discussion for another day…

The development in the Church’s understanding of dignity traced by Brady, however, lies behind some of the more visible changes in Church teaching, particularly on religious freedom, democratic participation, and the death penalty. Yet, although the dignity of the person is regularly referred to in Church documents, it has never been formally defined as a doctrine, nor has the Magisterium explicitly explained that the teaching has developed in a definitive way. One might say that the dignity of the human person has become part of the ordinary Magisterium but has not (yet) been formally taught through the extraordinary Magisterium. Of course, the latter is not necessary for a teaching to be authoritative, yet the lack of an explicit statement defining human dignity as a doctrine has, I would argue, helped make it possible for a minority of Catholics to resist the development of Church teaching in the three areas mentioned above, all dependent on a robust sense of human dignity: religious freedom, democratic participation, and the death penalty.

I don’t know if the proposed DDF document on dignity will clarify the teaching’s doctrinal status or even tackle the doctrine’s development, but I still wanted to take the occasion of Pope Francis mentioning that this document was in the works to explore this important issue.