Human Dignity: Religion, Politics, or Natural Morality?

The sentence against Socrates

In connection with his visit to Spain, and in particular his address to the Parliament, Pope Leo XIV has been criticized in some media outlets for having argued that democratic parliaments must be subject to certain basic moral norms, such as those associated with human dignity. It has been said that the Pope was speaking as head of the Catholic Church, that the Spanish Parliament is not composed solely of Catholics, and that he should not have questioned the legitimacy of the Parliament to enact laws, based on the majority rule. This is the paragraph that has attracted the most disagreement:

If life ceases to be recognized as a fundamental value, what will be the future of our societies? Can a community that casts a shadow over the unborn child, the elderly, the sick, those who suffer in silence, or those who depend entirely on the care of others, truly be called just? The defense of human life is not a partisan issue nor a confessional interest: it is a goal of civilization. All human life must be recognized and protected from conception to natural death, in every circumstance of its existence. When this certainty is obscured, the most vulnerable are the first victims, and the law loses its deepest meaning: to serve and protect every person. Therefore, the moral greatness of a nation is manifested, above all, in its capacity to accompany, protect, and love those lives that are most fragile.

In this paragraph, Leo XIV defends the human dignity of children who are not allowed to be born, and of the elderly and sick, who are sometimes pushed toward euthanasia. The Spanish Parliament has passed laws that call this dignity into question, in spite of the long applause of the parliamentarians to this speech by the Pope. Deep down, few Spanish parliamentarians admit to feeling challenged by this other paragraph of the Pope’s speech:

A law does not attain its true greatness merely by virtue of having been formally approved; It achieves true dignity when, in addition to being valid in form, it can stand up to the dignity of the person and emerge from that examination without shame.

Does democracy guarantee that laws passed by democratically elected parliaments respect human dignity? Clearly not. Let's look at some examples:

·         Hitler came to power after democratic elections. Does that justify the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust, primarily in gas chambers?

·         Athenian democracy was discredited for millennia by the condemnation of Socrates.

·         Western democracy, or what remains of it, since we no longer live in a democracy but in a political system that Aristotle called demagogy, has prevented hundreds of millions of children from being born (an estimated 73 million a year worldwide).

Is confessional the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948? No, it isn't. Its articles are based on natural morality and human dignity. However, Article 3 is violated by current laws passed by the Spanish Parliament and many others:

Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

In his address, the Pope had to recall Article 26.3 of the same declaration, which is also threatened by Spanish educational legislation:

Article 26.3: Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

For almost two centuries, science has been very clear that the life of an individual belonging to a sexually reproducing species begins at the moment of fertilization of the ovum by the sperm, or by their equivalents in the case of plants. A human individual, therefore, begins to live at that instant. Those who attempt to justify laws that permit abortion because “the fetus is not a human being” demonstrate scientific ignorance. These laws are not just contrary to human dignity, but also to science.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca