By Michael Pakaluk

"Infinite Dignity," the name of the recent Declaration on Human Dignity from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, is liable to confuse English speakers. "Infinite" means strictly "lacking a limit." We implicitly, however, supply in quantity, such as in time, power, or perfection. Already many have carped that only God in His nature can claim to be infinite in those senses. Is this Declaration, then, affirming some new humanism, based on the divinity of the human person?

The Declaration is clear that it means "not limited by circumstances." That is, human dignity does not go away when someone is poor, weak, in the last throes of a fatal illness . . .or in the mother's womb. That is to say, the Declaration wishes to emphasize exactly the point that the pro-life movement has always wished to emphasize. The possession of human rights cannot depend upon one's location, whether one is in the womb or not, or upon whether someone else wants you or not, or has conferred standing upon you or not.

Human rights depend upon human nature, and in virtue of that nature, we have an intrinsic and inviolable dignity. If it would be a gross violation of human rights to allow the dispatching of unwelcome, born children - or even to claim a right to do so! - then the same holds for unborn children.

In dealing so frankly with the basis of human rights, the Declaration provides a needed foundation for the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration celebrates that other Declaration and assesses it (with St. John Paul II) as the attainment by humankind of a high level of clarity about the claims that follow from human dignity.

And yet as Jacques Maritain made clear in his own reflections on the crafting of that earlier Declaration, it deliberately left unclear the philosophical and religious basis for the rights it was heralding.

The drafters of the Declaration depended on the pragmatic method of what John Rawls would later call "overlapping consensus." In the aftermath of World War II, in the midst of a general recoil against the horrors of Nazism, it seemed enough simply to affirm rights, generally agreed upon, which were negated by the militarism and racism of the Nazi movement.

This required some downplaying of analogous negations by the Soviet Union, a signatory. And, clearly, if atheistic Communists were joining in support, then the true basis of human rights, in the transcendent dignity of the human person created by God and redeemed by Jesus Christ could not be asserted.

But how are things working out under the method of "overlapping consensus"? Simply look at the litany of violations of human dignity in the second part of the DDF's Declaration. The consensus has broken down. As the Declaration points out, spurious rights are now asserted, based on false ideas of human freedom and autonomy. These rights ("the right to choose") even enjoy the protection of law and are held to trump genuine rights. They can even claim for themselves the august title of "dignity" (such as "Death with Dignity").

One would think that in such a context "Infinite Dignity" would affirm, as do the U.S. bishops, that "the threat of abortion" is the "preeminent priority" for political guidance and policy.

Isn't legal abortion in furtherance of a "right to choose" the clearest, most flagrant, negation of the truth that this Declaration wishes to assert? Indeed, it does take this position, in two ways.

First, it does so in what it says. Quoting St. John Paul II, the Declaration observes that: "The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior, and even in law itself is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake."

And quoting Pope Francis, it asserts: "this defense of unborn life is closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right. It invol...