Father Raymond De Souza, a Canadian priest who has criticized the Synod on synodality, writes in The Wall Street Journal that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s new document, Dignitas Infinita, is in strong continuity with Pope Benedict XVI’s magisterium, particularly his encyclical Caritas in Veritate.
“Unusually for Pope Francis, the text quotes extensively from his predecessors—the title is a phrase used by St. John Paul II—demonstrating that concerns for human dignity inform all of Catholic teaching and can’t be neatly aligned with a conservative or liberal political agenda,” writes Father De Souza.
“To act against nature is to degrade it, and to act against reason,” he continued. “Failure to do so leads to obvious tension, such as opposing genetic modification of crops but allowing puberty blockers for minors. Or hailing Pope Francis for his concern about the climate while ignoring his insistence that marriage is a part of a healthy human ecology. In each case, the world has lost its sense of nature.”
