Dignity for all God’s people

Mary Assumed into Heaven is the patronal feast of South Africa. The archdiocese of Cape Town recently celebrated 60 years since our patroness was declared with the theme “Safeguarding the Dignity of All”.

"The mandate given to us in the gospel of Luke is to go out and bring dignity to all people."

Catholic Social Teachings, based on the Gospel and written in response to what’s happening in the world, guides us as Christians on how to respond to the poverty we see around us and how to actively work to change the causes of poverty, of all sorts. Responding to poverty is restoring the dignity of people. The dignity of the human race is one of the underlying principles of the Catholic Social Teachings.

The principle of dignity is underpinned by the knowledge that God made everyone in this world, so whenever we look at another person we are seeing a creation of God.

Yet God did not just create people, God created people in the image and likeness of himself. This means that people are very special. So all people, as beings created in the likeness of God, have human dignity and the right to be treated with dignity.

The human dignity of all people can only be recognised and protected in a community. This is the teaching of the dignity of the human race. All people must be treated with dignity and respect because they are creations of God and are created in God’s image. Everyone is entitled to their basic human rights. The teaching of the dignity of the human race teaches us to treat each person with dignity and to protect the human rights of all people.

As a child, I was very fortunate to have parents who understood what this principle of dignity means.  My father instilled in us, during the height of apartheid, that we were not less, lower or anything smaller than anyone else. This has stood me in good stead throughout my life, because I never felt that I was stripped of my dignity, even though the political system was designed to do just that.

To safeguard someone’s dignity is to make sure that we do not take away what is due to them as a creature of God.

Although unjust regimes and political systems, like apartheid, are guilty of human rights abuses on a large scale, we, as individuals, can very easily do this to others, by ourselves.

We are all in relationships of many kinds, and this is where we have our experiences of dignity.  When we treat a person unjustly, we are not safeguarding that person’s dignity. A boss can quite easily do this to an employee, a colleague can do it just as easily to another colleague, friend to friend, parent to child, child to parent, sibling to sibling, lover to lover, spouse to spouse and neighbour to neighbour.

We have to remember, always, that we as well as every single other person are created in the image of God. The mandate given to us in the gospel of Luke is to go out and bring dignity to all people.

As lay people we are in the position of being “out there”, in the world where we can truly bring dignity to all: in organisations, factories, schools, hospitals, businesses, shopping malls, social groups, sports clubs, and so on.