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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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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How the Russian Orthodox Church Preserves International Sympathies for Russia’s War Against Ukraine

Regina Elsner is a professor of Eastern Churches and Ecumenical Theology at the Catholic-Theological Faculty at the University of Münster.

For the Christian world, religious legitimation of military aggression has become increasingly untenable, particularly after German Protestant and Catholic representatives stood on the side of Hitler’s warfare. Decades of theological engagement, reconciliation, and ecumenical dialogue followed the World Council of Church’s 1948 assertion that “war is contrary to the will of God,” and churches have since published countless documents  positioning themselves as the vanguards of justice, peace, and preservation of God’s creation.

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