Medicine for Motion Sickness: Dignitas Infinita, Part 1
Author: Andrew Comiskey
April 22, 2024
‘We
cannot separate the masculine and the feminine from God’s work of creation,
which is prior to all our decisions and experiences, and where biological
elements exist which is impossible to ignore. Only by acknowledging and
accepting this difference in reciprocity can each person fully discover themselves,
their dignity, and their identity.’ DignitasInfinita (59)
We long
to be reconciled to what is most authentic about our sexual humanity. Especially
children. Kids just want to belong: to be confirmed and roused in their unique
skin as boys powerful and tender, girls strong in beauty.
At a
conference last week in California, a father blessed me profusely for ministering to
his family back at Vineyard Anaheim in the nineties. He then had a son exhibiting
dysphoric feminine behavior; I counseled him over the next couple of years. With
more attuned fathering, the son grew naturally out of inordinate feminine
identification and into whole reconciliation with his creative, centered masculinity.
He is an artist today and a community leader, a married man with children.
Original
dignity. I delight in my difference as man in relation to woman. Fragrant
wisdom draws and balances me. Of course, radical wholeness competes with
radical sin. Each of us can slalom between blessedness in our male or female
selves to bruising then grasping for order in some disordered way.
As a
person still subject to same-sex desires, my commitment to ‘center’ in original
dignity has not been easy with Pope Francis. He started his pontificate 11
years ago with ‘who am I to judge?’ ‘gay’ persons and has struggled ever since to
carve a clear path pastorally for people like me.
He
has accompanied me to confusion. Sitting in the passenger seat behind him at
the wheel has given me motion sickness. Fiducia Supplicans ratcheted up thenausea. (I love much about the man and his compassionate leadership but have had
to look around and under him to stay grounded on the Church’s foundational
teachings on sexuality.)
I am surprised
to rejoice in the Pope’s new declaration, Dignitas Infinita, which was written (and
refined by many) over a 5-year-period by himself and his doctrine guy, Victor
Manuel Fernandez. This refreshing re-articulation of every human person’s
dignity felt like Francis was driving straight. I am experiencing terra firma,
truth as bedrock; Dignitas invites a world poised on shaky legs and eyes
agitated by idolatry to walk a clear path.
I am
most attuned to the latter portions of this 20-page document related to sexual
clarity, but Dignitas doesn’t allow that (in the best of Catholic tradition). Human
dignity spans a spectrum of needs: systemic injustices abound and build on each
other. I felt proud to be Catholic and roused to read Francis’ call to prophetic
courage in the face of a multi-headed culture of death: abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia,
war, slavery, genocide, torture, unjust punishment for LGBTQers, grotesque
economic inequities, slavery, human trafficking, the death penalty itself,
marginalization of the disabled, mistreatment of migrants, violence against
women, digital violence, and sexual abuse, beginning with the Church cleansing
herself of corruption.
I
especially valued this. Building on a Catholic vision of empowering mother and
child, Dignitas refuses surrogacy as it violates both. ‘The woman is detached
from the child growing in her and becomes… subservient…to the arbitrary gain of
others’ (50). Bedrock: protect justice for all at our foundations.
Dignitas
was written to commemorate 75 years of the United Nations’ Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and to expand its scope to include a host of indignities
that mask as human ‘liberties’. A postwar world reeling from Nazi atrocities, a
nuclear meltdown, and growing concern over communism had evolved.
Francis
employs his heavyweight predecessors—Paul VI (Humanae Vitae), John Paul II
(Theology of the Body, Veritatis Splendor, et. al), and Benedict XVI (Caritas
in Veritate, et. al)— to help him establish ‘human dignity’ on Jesus and His
Rock, and the Church as dignity’s promoter and defender. In so doing, Francis challenges
false ideas of human freedom that morphed since 1948.
That
is most evident in Francis’ decrying ‘gender theory’, the notion that our
sexual selves exist on an expanding spectrum from which we can choose personal options
in defiance of the intrinsic duality of male and female. Francis declares that our
bodies speak a better word than our sexual identity manipulations (55-60). Who
is this guy?!
He roots
sexual difference in the Imago Dei, the core of our human nature designed by God,
and insists we recognize and revel in that sexual complementarity. We alter
that duality to our peril, ‘entering into competition with God Himself’ (57), especially
in efforts to change sex (60).
Dignitas
Infinita anchors human dignity in ‘the greatest possible difference between
living beings, the sexual difference. This foundational difference is not only
the greatest imaginable difference but is also the most beautiful and powerful
of them. In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvelous
of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to
surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world’ (58).
Terra
firma, east of Eden. Dignitas is as imperfect as its locale but I’m game. And
grateful. The pastor waxed prophetic and gave me medicine for the low-grade
nausea he helped to sustain. I’ll take it. And hold fast to Dignitas when he goes
rogue and offroad once more. He will. Francis and friends delight in splitting truth
from the care of souls, as I’ll describe next week in Part 2.
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