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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Infinite Love and the (In)dignity of Christ: Reflections on Francis’s Theology of Infinite Human Dignity from Infinite Divine Love

Greg Marcar is a research affiliate and teaching fellow at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI), University of Otago (New Zealand). He is a co-editor of Søren Kierkegaard: Theologian of the Gospel (Wipf & Stock 2021) and  Security, Religion, and the Rule of Law: International Perspectives (Routledge 2023).

Dignity and Its Discontents: A Foundationless Foundation?

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) begins with the assertion that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights . . . and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” One of the co-drafters of the UDHR, René Cassin, likened its Preamble and Articles to the parts of a temple portico, with Article 1’s affirmation of dignity, liberty, equality, and fraternity forming the foundation block of this structure.

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