What Does Dignitas Infinita Say about Gender?

Francisca Pérez-Madrid is Professor of Law and Religion at the University of Barcelona.

The declaration Dignitas Infinita prepared by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith seeks to consolidate the affirmations of recent Popes on human dignity. The text is a voice raised to the world on the inalienable and unconditional dignity of every human being, which corresponds to an individual’s nature beyond any cultural change. The document’s argumentation is based on faith and reason and refers to sacred scripture and on the teachings of the Catholic Church.

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Developing Our Understanding of Human Dignity for the Digital Age

Paolo Carozza is a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School.

While the dignity of the human person is recognized to be “the foundation of all the other principles and content of the [Catholic] Church’s social doctrine,” this is not to say that there aren’t difficult and important disagreements internal to the tradition about the exact basis and meaning of human dignity, and about the implications of recognizing and respecting it in our social relations, especially in relation to the changing and contingent conditions of the material environment in which men and women live at any given time and place.

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Theological Perspectives on the Document Dignitas Infinita

Rev. Thomas Massaro, S.J., is Professor of Moral Theology at Fordham University in New York City.

As a Catholic theologian and a Jesuit priest, I noticed two sets of immediate reactions within the Roman Catholic community to the teaching document Dignitas Infinita. This 15,000-word declaration of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith was released on 8 April 2024, timed (roughly so, as is often the case with Vatican promulgations) to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the founding documents of the United Nations.

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