Is Man’s Dignity “Infinite”? Or, How Not to Write an Opening Sentence

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Preliminary Note: If you haven’t already filled out the four-question survey from last Friday, please take a moment to do so here (it’s at the very end of that post).

This past week has been abuzz with reactions to Dignitas Infinita, the new document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by the dizzyling incompetent Cardinal Fernández, whose expertise on kissing and other intimacies needs no advertisement. It’s rather depressing to see that the document opens with a stupendous falsehood:

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.

But no creature has an infinite dignity. That’s sheer balderdash. Only God has, or rather is, infinite dignity; and those who participate in Christ share, finitely, in His dignity as Son of God. Those who rebel against God lose the moral-spiritual dignity He intended to give them, and, while they retain their (again finite) metaphysical dignity as rational animals, they lack the dignity for which they were created. You might say that Christian man possesses, through participation, a “quasi-infinite” dignity — something that goes beyond anything and everything else in the order of material creation.¹

That which is “infinite” is that which has no limits or definition or end outside itself (that’s why God is rightly called infinite, and He alone). But man’s dignity is very much tied to his nature and his end. If his dignity were infinite, then he would stand in no need of God or of redemption/salvation. Indeed, he would be his own god.