Man's dignity rests on the image of God, not on his abilities

At the general audience of Wednesday 9 September 2026, in Saint Peter's Square, Leo XIV devoted his catechesis to the dignity of the human person. Continuing a series of meditations on the documents of Vatican II, he commented on the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes and quoted no. 50 of his encyclical Magnifica humanitas: the dignity of man “does not depend on the abilities it possesses, on its riches or on the role it occupies”; it is “a gift, which precedes it and surpasses it”.

He grounds this dignity on the creation of man “in the image of God”, able to know and love his Creator, and recalls the unity of soul and body: to reduce the body to an object one might dispose of arbitrarily is, he says, “always a negation of the dignity of the person”. He warns against the “falsifications and manipulations” that distort its perception today, distinguishes three dimensions — intelligence, conscience and freedom — and concludes that “it is in Him alone”, in Christ, “that the mystery of man finds its true light”.

On this point nothing is new, and that is its strength. That man holds his dignity from being created in the image of God, endowed with a rational soul united to the body and ordered to know and love his Creator, the Church holds from Genesis and has taught without interruption. The Catechism of the Council of Trent sets it down in the very article on creation: God formed man in his likeness, breathed into him an immortal soul, and entrusted him with his own body not as an arbitrary domain but as a stewardship. Dignity as a gift received, prior to all merit and all role, is the perennial doctrine, not a discovery.

It is also the measure. Dignity is defended only when kept bound to its source: separated from God, it turns back on itself, and the man who calls himself absolute master of his flesh is the first to make of it what he claims to forbid — an object. The fifth commandment said it long before our debates: no one owns his body, because he did not give it to himself. Where the catechesis leads the person back to his divine origin and refuses that anyone dispose of him, it restates the ancient law; and it is from that law, not from the road that leads back to it, that the dignity of man receives its light.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the creation of man and the fifth commandment; Genesis 1:26-27, on man made to the image of God.