The Affirmation of Genuine Human Dignity

Catholic theology traditionally has described the human person’s place in creation, using terms borrowed from the broader context of Catholic cosmology. To understand the human person, one must first view him in relation to God and only then in relation to the rest of creation. Such a comparison reveals that the human person occupies a privileged place within the created order. The only temporal creature created in God’s image, the human person has been elevated to a position somewhere above the brutes and somewhere below the angels, but over the past century, the Catholic Church increasingly has emphasized the dignity of the human person. Indeed, the notion of the fundamental dignity of the human person has become a major theme within both the Catholic Church’s ordinary catechesis and Catholic social thought