Daniel del Castillo González
What does a person’s dignity depend on? During the General Audience, Pope Leo XIV focused his reflection on the idea that neither wealth nor social status determines a person’s dignity.
The idea was already present in Gaudium et spes, published during the Second Vatican Council in 1965.
Its first chapter is devoted precisely to human dignity, which has its origin in God, with every person created in his image.
POPE LEO XIV
Every person is thought of and willed by God to enter into a history of communion with Him, with others and with creation. Their dignity does not depend on the abilities they possess, their wealth or the role they hold, or the right or wrong choices they make. Rather, it is a gift that precedes and transcends them, placed by God as an expression of His love, which never fails.
But Leo XIV takes the reflection a step further: this dignity does not mean living in isolation.
Being a person means being in relationship with God and with others, but it also means responsibility, solidarity and mutual care.
POPE LEO XIV
Finally, three are the most significant expressions of the dignity of the person recalled by Gaudium et spes*: intelligence, which makes the human being an insatiable seeker of truth; conscience, through which he gives unity and meaning to his own life; and freedom, which makes him the responsible protagonist of his own decisions
It is a reflection that Leo XIV had already developed in his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas.
There, he addresses human dignity in a context marked by the development of artificial intelligence and the risk of measuring human beings according to their abilities or productivity.
As he concluded his message to the thousands of pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope called on them to promote and defend the dignity that every person receives in a unique and indelible way.
And amid the greetings, a choir — certainly worthy of the occasion — sang its finest notes for the successor of Peter.
