Cutting Room Floor 2

IC XC
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NI KA

Our Moral Theology Final was edited for presentation. There were some parts that I cut out which I think are important – not to the final, but to the praxis. This series is made up of those parts.

Social Dignity: Expanded Text

Social Dignity is explained in ¶8 of Dignitas Infinita. This is the ambient environment in which one finds oneself. (Existential Dignity, which will be part 3 of this series, is subtly different: “How one understands oneself in the social environment”.)

When we speak of social dignity, we refer to the quality of a person’s living conditions. For example, in cases of extreme poverty, where individuals do not even have what is minimally necessary to live according to their ontological dignity, it is said that those poor people are living in an “undignified” manner. This expression does not imply a judgment on those individuals but highlights how the situation in which they are forced to live contradicts their inalienable dignity. 

As I mentioned in my presentation text, it’s possible in San Francisco to meet someone who has, until now, never had any social life outside of the Gay Community. In fact, many people move to SF exactly because it is possible to construct a life in such a way – gay friends, gay social events, gay clubs, gay art and community events, even gay churches. There are even a gay Masonic lodge. There are ads depicting gay couples, monuments and political discourse celebrating gay events and leadership, and anyone who challenges that social bubble is either only ignored or else labeled a hater and socially/politically disempowered.

If the desire for disordered sexual expression is, itself, out of keeping with ontological dignity, how much more so the social system that buffets that desire and expression for challenges that may otherwise bring a person to doubt “the bubble”? This does seem to be an exact parallel with living in extreme poverty, but it is also living in extreme denial. I am not poor!

We can read this as a manifestation of the saying of St Anthony the Great: “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.”

When someone from this world comes to church – perhaps because they know someone who identifies as “gay and Catholic” – they need to see a new lived reality instantly. This is where Jesus’ saying, “See how they love each other” comes to the fore. The Church should be a healthy, functioning family space – not just friendly to families, but creating and presenting a family space in which other feel welcomed’ and from which extends a constant invitation to “taste and see.” The desire to “join us” should never have the sense of “I like Jesus, but your followers are another matter.”

Additionally, the actions of the Church should be disruptive to that other world: not as an act of intolerance, but as an act of continual social disobedience. The essential kerygma must always be proclaimed: this world is not our home, not good enough, does not satisfy the constant quest of a heart that is made to rest only in God. It’s not correct to say, “Sinner Repent” but rather “Prodigal come home.” Our message must not only make clear our attitude towards actions beneath human dignity, but – at the same time – must convey our divinely revealed sense of human dignity in each person. It’s not enough say, “come home” but rather it is our mission to make home a place to which someone would want to come in the first place, not because of liturgy, or music, or theological truth, as such – all that will follow in due time – but rather “how we love one another” must be the draw.

This echoed most clearly in the catechetical process of the Early Church. While the inquirer was supposed to beginning the Christian moral life (Moral Dignity) he was taught nothing of the creed or doctrines or the Holy Mysteries: that was all reserved to later. Rather, he was called out of his previous social network and integrated in to the Church’s social teaching, and social structure: only after baptism was he taught the doctrines. How and who came first. Why and what followed initiation.

If we evangelized by weaning folks away from the world – including their personal, mental, and spiritual additions to the world – by showing them the new creation in which to live, we could worry about teaching them about that world after they had entered it. This is how it works for babies too: a baby is born and grows up in the world without ever knowing how it works. We only get aaround to the “how” when they are old enough.