Catholic Transcript Online

Dignitas Personae (literally: “The Dignity of a Person”) is the title of a recent Vatican Instruction detailing the Church’s assessment of current scientific developments and technological applications regarding the anthropological, theological and ethical aspects of human life, especially new problems relating to procreation, and new treatments pertaining to the manipulation of human embryos. The document was formulated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and ordered published by Pope Benedict XVI on 8 September, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is the second major intervention by the Holy See into new questions in the areas of procreation and embryonic experimentation.

Dignitas Personae continues and elaborates upon an earlier Vatican Instruction, Donum Vitae (“The Gift of Life”), published 22 February 1987, when Pope John Paul II was the Holy Father, and our present Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The latest Vatican document, while reaffirming basic bioethical principles concerning procreation, provides moral guidance into previously unexplored topics, such as human-animal hybrid embryos, embryonic stem cell research, embryonic experimentation, gene therapy and cryopreservation of human embryos.

Unprecedented bioethical questions urgently requiring addressing should not surprise anyone who begins to grasp the reality of all that is happening within the field. Almost 30 years ago, theologian Ronald Lawler, in a superb lecture sponsored by the Pope John Paul II Bioethics Center of Holy Apostles Seminary, Cromwell, explained that “bioethics had to grow” exponentially. “We have come to know a lot more,” he said, “and are able to do a lot more, so that ethical questions that simply did not exist before have arisen before us and demand answers. Moreover, these questions in the life sciences touch so closely the lives of all of us that it would be inhuman not to think seriously about them.” For example, Father Lawler pointed to technological reproduction and the treatment of rape victims. “These new moral questions,” he argued, “do not arise merely because people have fallen away from their old moral convictions; they arise because even familiar principles can be applied to new contexts and issues only with difficulty.”

When Donum Vitae was published in 1987, urgent questions included new forms of artificial conception, what the world terms “technological reproduction,” forms like artificial insemination (AI) and in vitro fertilization (“test-tube” conception); also, various means of “surrogate motherhood”; also, “extracorporeal embryos.” Even in 1987, however, serious questions about human cloning were beginning to emerge – as well as the spectre of hybrid experimentation. Now, however, cloning and hybrid experimentation are issues of immediate concern throughout the world.

Specifically, the Vatican document cautions, human cloning is intrinsically illicit since “it seeks to give rise to a new human being without a connection to the act of reciprocal self-giving between the spouses and, more radically, without any link to sexuality. This leads to manipulation and abuses gravely injurious to human dignity.” (Sec. 28) If carried out specifically for reproduction, it would “impose on the resulting individual a predetermined genetic identity, subjecting him … to a form of biological slavery, from which it would be difficult to free himself.” And the very fact “that someone would arrogate to himself the right to determine arbitrarily the genetic characteristics of another person represents a grave offense to the dignity of that person as well as to the fundamental equality of all people.” (Sec. 29)

If not pursued for reproductive reasons, so-called therapeutic cloning is seen as even more serious an assault on human dignity. This follows from the fact that the creation of embryos with the purpose of destroying them for the use of others “makes the existence of a human being at the embryonic stage nothing more than a means to be used and destroyed. It is gravely immoral to sacrifice a human life for therapeutic ends.” (Sec. 30)

And with respect to “hybridization” – “hybrid cloning” – it certainly constitutes “an offense against the dignity of human beings” because of “the admixture of human and animal genetic elements capable of disrupting the specific identity of man.”  (Sec. 33)

In reading and studying Dignitas Personae, one is repeatedly reminded of the nobility of the human person, fashioned by God in his image; and that human beings are meant to be “begotten in love, not manufactured.” A human being is a “Thou,” as existentialist Martin Buber insisted, never merely an “it.”

The Church’s noble vision of the person, which is true and perennial, is the Alpha and the Omega of every bioethical question.