Fr. Billy Swan
Of all the religions of the world, none insists on the dignity of the human person more than Christianity. With our Jewish brothers and sisters, we hold that we bear the imago Dei, the image of our Creator. If that claim wasn’t extraordinary enough, Christianity takes it a stage further and says that every baptized person is also a beloved child of God the Father, a temple of the Holy Spirit and co-heir of Christ. This means that we have been adopted in love by the Father and given an inheritance that Paul describes as “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Eph. 1:3). With the words of the father in the parable of the prodigal son, God reminds us that because we are co-heirs with Christ, “all I have is yours” (Luke 15:31). Christians hold that this amazing inheritance as sons and daughters of God is enjoyed by us already in the present but that its full benefits will be enjoyed in a future preserved for us by God.
In the course of human history, this divinely conferred dignity of the human person has often been reduced or ignored with tragic consequences. There are several examples we could mention including the horrors of the Second World War. In the aftermath of that conflict, the world struggled to come to terms with the barbaric examples it had witnessed of man’s inhumanity to man. In response, the United Nations drew up its Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In the Church, the dogma of the Assumption of Mary was defined in Rome on November 1, 1950, by Pope Pius XII. To most people at the time, the dogma had only to do with Mary and the confirmation of something that Christians had held for centuries beforehand—namely, that Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven at the end of her earthly life. But perhaps without fully realizing it, the Church was making an extremely important affirmation not only about the dignity and destiny of Mary but about the dignity and destiny of every human being. It was a message the world badly needed to hear then as it does now.
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