By CHRISTOPHER MANION
“Every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter” — Declaration of Human Dignity, Vatican Dicastery For the Doctrine of the Faith, April 8, 2024.
“By sin, man loses a twofold dignity, one in respect of God, the other in respect of the Church. In respect of God, he again loses a twofold dignity. one is his principal dignity, whereby he was counted among the children of God, and this he recovers by Penance, which is signified (Luke 15) in the prodigal son, for when he repented, his father commanded that the first garment should be restored to him, together with a ring and shoes. The other is his secondary dignity, viz. innocence, of which, as we read in the same chapter, the elder son boasted saying (Luke 15:29): “Behold, for so many years do I serve thee, and I have never transgressed thy commandments”: and this dignity the penitent cannot recover” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II, Q.89, A3).
In his introduction to Fiducia Supplicans, the document released last December by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Tucho Cardinal Fernandez wrote that, “Since ‘the Roman Curia is primarily an instrument at the service of the Successor of Peter,’ our work must foster, along with an understanding of the Church’s perennial doctrine, the reception of the Holy Father’s teaching.”
Phil Lawler reports that last Monday, in his presentation of the new Declaration of Human Dignity, “Fernández read from the Code of Canon Law (n. 751), noting that the faithful are obliged to give ‘religious submission of the intellect and the will’ to statements of the Magisterium.”
Tucho is intent on proclaiming that every word that comes from his Dicastery is magisterial.
So, while the Declaration pretends to develop the “ontological” character of “dignity,” its core mission is to suspend Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction. Only God’s dignity is infinite, but actually, so is ours — Everyman’s dignity is infinite.
Admittedly the logic is a bit sketchy, and the phrasing a bit awkward, but the message comes through nonetheless: We must give “religious submission of the intellect and will” to magisterial “truths” that clearly contradict one another.
Tucho’s statement last Monday sheds more light on an issue that arose some six years ago, when Pope Francis addressed “dignity” in a different context. “The death penalty is “inadmissible, because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” he wrote in 2018.
To be sure, Francis was contradicting two millennia of the Church’s Magisterial teaching, but he didn’t seem to mind. And the Dicastery’s statement last Monday can now be used as proof that “infinite dignity” can now trump that teaching.
And given Tucho’s invocation of Canon Law on Monday, the condemnation of the death penalty is now on the same magisterial level as the Incarnation.
The Truth’s Long, Hard Slog
For the past century and more, the Magisterium has had a tough ride. When we look at Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891), and its introduction of “Social Justice” (undefined) into the “magisterial” realm, that vague assertion, plus the equally vague and new meaning of “magisterial,” had a powerful impact on what became the Church’s “Social Teaching.”
“In 1931,” writes Thomas Patrick Burke, “Pope Pius XI used the term ‘social justice’ in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, giving it official recognition throughout the Roman Catholic Church. ‘The right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching’.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t lose any time in wrapping himself in the authority of the Catholic Church. In 1936, he quoted this encyclical in a speech before a large crowd in Detroit. “It is a declaration from one of the greatest forces of conservatism in the world, the Catholic Church,” he said, and it is “just as radical as I am…one of the greatest documents of modern times.”
He quoted from the Encyclical at length:
“It is patent in our days that not alone is wealth accumulated, but immense power and despotic economic domination are concentrated in the hands of a few, and that those few are frequently not the owners but only the trustees and directors of invested funds which they administer at their good pleasure….
“This accumulation of power, the characteristic note of the modern economic order, is a natural result of limitless free competition, which permits the survival of those only who are the strongest, which often means those who fight most relentlessly, who pay least heed to the dictates of conscience.
“This concentration of power has led to a threefold struggle for domination: First, there is the struggle for dictatorship in the economic sphere itself; then the fierce battle to acquire control of the Government, so that its resources and authority may be abused in the economic struggle, and, finally, the clash between the Governments themselves.”
Counseled and cheered by Msgr. John A. Ryan, author of the 1919 pastoral letter of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and its chief spokesman in the 1930s, Roosevelt and the American Democrat left have invoked “social justice” to mean whatever they want it to mean.
That vague (and often vapid) use of “Social Justice” — and its claim of Magisterial authority for whatever political opinion it is used to defend or assert — has caused untold confusion and real damage ever since. Popes since 1849 have condemned socialism on grounds of fundamental principle — but since Rerum Novarum, the “Catholic” Left has opposed that absolute and objective denunciation by countering it with “Social Justice.”
Filling The Vacuum Left By Ignoring Humanae Vitae
Today, that approach has rendered the truths of Magisterium optional: Hundreds of prominent theologians repudiated Humanae Vitae within weeks of its promulgation in 1968, and two generations of priests and bishops have ignored it ever since.
Meanwhile, the political opinions of the Left are now “magisterial” — from “Liberation Theology” to the thousands upon thousands of “pastorals,” “letters to Congress,” and other episcopal missives masquerading as the teaching of “The Church.”
Many Catholics welcomed the Dicastery’s document last Monday because it reaffirmed the evils of “gender ideology.”
Instead of the document’s endless word salad, why not make it brief and clear? Humanae Vitae is the Magisterial statement articulating all of the principles that render gender ideology a false gospel. Why not just state the obvious?
But that would not serve their purpose. With this new document, they can point to our “support” of the statement’s confirming the evils of gender ideology (as far as it goes) to justify their elevation of every other false assertion they’ve made over the years to the same “magisterial” level.
And we should not forget that in the time of Leo XIII, “Christian Socialism” was a new thing that captivated Catholic intellectuals both cleric and lay.
95 percent of the world’s population was living in abject poverty in that era. Today, that figure is no more than 10 percent, and most of those still suffering are living under socialism.
Pope Leo XIII would be astounded at the abundance that the free market has allowed the world to achieve since the nineteenth century. Today’s “Social Justice Warriors” know it. But they have to keep beating the same tiresome tune because they have nothing else to fill in the vast abyss they have created by turning their back on the Church’s moral teaching in Humanae Vitae, Casti Connubii, and two thousand years of the Church’s teaching on sex, marriage, and children.
It’s that teaching that is truly magisterial.
Jesus Christ destroys Tucho's Heresies
Matthew 7:23
And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, you that work iniquity.
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