Dignitas Infinita needed some Familiaris Consortio

The expressed intent of the recent declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is to “illuminate different facets of human dignity that might be obscured in many people’s consciousness” (Dignitas Infinita, Presentation). To the extent that the Declaration—though not intended to be comprehensive—selects topics that are indeed heavily “obscured” today, it succeeds.

But it falls disappointingly short of illuminating them in an integral and wholistic way.

The main reason, I would argue, is that it fails to remind us—at least in a rudimentary way—of the very core of Catholic social teaching: the family. By “family,” I don’t mean the vaguely defined “human family” (cf. DI 14, 51, 62, 66), but rather “the original cell of social life” (CCC 2207) constituted by “a man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children” (CCC 2202). It is troubling that a document devoted to recalling “fundamental principles and theoretical premises, with the goal of offering important clarifications that can help avoid frequent confusion that surrounds the use of the term ‘dignity’” (DI, Presentation), fails to once reference the most eloquent magisterial pronouncement on the family in recent times, John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio (1981).

In that landmark document, we read that “not infrequently ideas and solutions which are very appealing but which obscure in varying degrees the truth and the dignity of the human person, are offered to the men and women of today, in their sincere and deep search for a response to the important daily problems that affect their married and family life” (FC, 4).

In other words, Saint John Paul presciently connected the obfuscation of consciousness subsequently referred to in Dignitas Infinita with the most vulnerable victim of this obfuscation, the family.

The problem with Dignitas Infinita lies not in its content, but in its need of a stronger axis around which to discuss the main threats to human dignity that it lists, and no one has understood that axis better than Pope John Paul II.

The most natural place to have addressed, however briefly, the centrality of the family in society would have been in the subsection entitled “The Relational Structure of the Human Person.” The document makes useful reference to John Paul II’s teaching in Evangelium Vitae that freedom is placed “at the service of the person and of his fulfillment through the gift of self and openness to others; but when freedom is made absolute in an individualistic way, it is emptied of its original content, and its very meaning and dignity are contradicted” (DI, 26; EV, 19).

But the Declaration could have easily added that the primary victim of this erroneous view of freedom is indeed the family, as John Paul II had already argued in Familiaris Consortio:

At the root of these negative phenomena (against the family), there frequently lies a corruption of the idea and the experience of freedom, conceived not as a capacity for realizing the truth of God’s plan for marriage and the family, but as an autonomous power of self-affirmation, often against others, for one’s own selfish well-being. (FC, 6)

Even more troubling is that this very subsection then strategically moves directly from the aforementioned misconception of freedom to the relationship between humans and nature, completely sidestepping the family. It rather quotes Pope Francis’s assertion in Laudate Deum (2023) that “it is not a matter of indifference to us that so many species are disappearing and that the climate crisis endangers the life of many other beings” (DI, 26; LD, 63).

How can a magisterial document with a subheading consisting of three short paragraphs dedicated to the “relational structure of the human person” not even mention the family?

One of those paragraphs—consisting of a single sentence—begs for completion with at least some affirmation that the most privileged locus of learning how to relate to others is the family. Paragraph 27 of the Declaration asserts that “human dignity also encompasses the capacity, inherent in human nature, to assume obligations vis-à-vis others.” How hard could it have been to add that “the family must help man to discern his own vocation and to accept responsibility in the search for greater justice, educating him from the beginning in interpersonal relationships” (FC, 2)?

To make matters worse, when Dignitas Infinita does mention the family, it tends to do so as a potentially negative influence on the acknowledgment of human dignity (cf. DI, 8 and 37). For example, it asserts that “violent family environments” may cause people to “struggle to live with peace, joy, and hope” and “drive people to experience their life conditions as ‘undignified’” (DI, 8). Fair and true enough, but the Declaration passes over a golden opportunity to reaffirm that “the discovery of and obedience to the plan of God on the part of the conjugal and family community must take place in ‘togetherness,’ through the human experience of love between husband and wife, between parents and children, lived in the Spirit of Christ” (FC, 54).

“Togetherness” is the key term for a Christian understanding of marriage and family, but you wouldn’t guess it from reading Dignitas Infinita alone, for there is not a single explicit reference to fatherhood. This is glaringly evident in the subsection on “Surrogacy,” which, according to the Declaration, “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs” (DI, 48).

But what about the father? The closest the subsection gets to mentioning any violation of the father’s dignity is in its acknowledgment that “the dignity of the human person also entails recognizing every dimension of the dignity of the conjugal union and of human procreation” (Ibid., emphasis mine). But as Familiaris Consortio makes clear, the dignity of the conjugal union and of human procreation is not simply tacked on to the dignity of a child. Rather, the conjugal union—the proper locus of human procreation—is the very matrix within which the child most fully discloses its human dignity. Another way of stating the issue is to join the Declaration in acknowledging that “a child is always a gift” (Ibid.) but to ask a question the Declaration ignores: a gift to whom?

This hole could easily have been filled with a simple reference to paragraph 14 of Familiaris Consortio (“Children, the Precious Gift of Marriage”), which states that the “gift” of conjugal love makes them (i.e., the couple) capable of the “greatest possible gift, the gift by which they become cooperators with God for giving life to a new person.” John Paul II continues:

Thus the couple, while giving themselves to one another, give not just themselves but also the reality of children, who are a living reflection of their love, a permanent sign of conjugal unity and a living and inseparable synthesis of their being a father and a mother.” (FC, 14, emphasis mine)

In short, there are two layers of giftedness that underlie the gift of children, both of which involve both the mother and the father: the “gift” that each member of the couple makes of him or herself in the conjugal act, and the “gift” which is the “new responsibility” the couple receives when they become parents. The moral distortedness of surrogacy lies not only in depriving the child of its biological mother’s womb, but in depriving the child of serving fully as a “visible sign of the very love of God, ‘from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named’” (Ibid.).

How quickly we have forgotten Familiaris Consortio. How quickly we have forgotten the wonder and joy that inevitably accompany the suffering and self-sacrifice required for spouses to give themselves to one another and open themselves generously to the gift of children.

In all fairness, the Declaration does restate clearly that the ideology of gender theory “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family” (DI, 59; cf. Amoris Laetitia, 56). But it is precisely this “anthropological basis of the family” that needs to be reiterated in the face of the growing threats to human dignity identified in Dignitas Infinita.

For all the Declaration’s merits, what really needs fleshing out is the inseverable connection between individual human dignity and the dignity of the family. A Declaration on that would be most timely and welcome.

Catholic World Report