Famed colonizing sexual predator group, the Catholic Church, solidified their bigotry and basic misunderstanding of language last week when they released the Dignitas Infinita document. This isn’t surprising in any way, but is a great look into the manipulation tactics that organized religion will use to control, scare, and gaslight its followers. Let’s dive in!

First, the document is named incorrectly. Infinity, as understood since before the Catholic Church existed, is something that is boundless, endless, and beyond representation by numbers. The document lays out the boundaries and limits in which dignity is possible, so, pretty much the opposite of infinity. They literally could have called the document finite dignity to make it accurate. What a bunch of dunces!!!! Except, it isn’t stupidity, it’s malicious manipulation, which makes it worse actually. The same manipulation plays out regarding the concept of “unconditional love” that god has for his followers, which his holy book lays out in detail all the conditions for his love. Being a follower is a big one! This tactic is used so that the blame can never be on god, or on the church even, or any physical representation of god, like a pastor or priest. If we presuppose completion, fullness, or even abundance in one direction, then the issue must be the other way. If god has unconditional love, then it’s people that are the problem! If the church is infinitely forgiving, then it must be the person who is excommunicated that is the problem. We have completeness on one side, the lack therefore has to be the other way. It’s where gaslighting comes into cultural awareness now, when one person is never to blame we see it’s an obvious tactic to shift blame, to even presuppose blame, to the other party. We know the church is problematic, they tried to take over the world, led multiple genocides, protected and continue to protect pedophiles, and maintain many stolen cultural goods and collected wealth from their attempts at colonization. Likewise god himself according to his own word has been known to throw down a genocide or two, he’s cool with slavery, he was cool with child sacrifice until he wasn’t except for his own kid. These are clearly not entirely good entities, so the manipulation is not allowing any of that to come up. Infinite, unconditional, these are words chosen to imply that they cannot be questioned and so fault must reside elsewhere. 

And for anyone who knows the bigotry of the right wing political machine in the US, the document goes on to attack trans and gender non-conforming populations, referring to them as “annihilating the concept of nature.” Guess we found where the finite end of dignity is. And, let’s check the Catholic church’s understanding of nature: the (flat) earth was created in 6 days, donkeys and snakes can talk, humans can fly, and women are inferior to men are just a few of the highlights. They are experts according to *checks notes again* themselves, based on their preferred reading of their own book at their own book club. It’s silly that anyone takes this group seriously. They are bigots who use a fictional story to gather wealth and power so they can abuse marginalized and vulnerable communities. 

But then, the Catholic church picks a sort of random enemy by going after surrogacy. This one popped up a few years ago, but like, in a weird way a lot of people kind of just dismissed it because it didn’t seem to be mainstream. It still isn’t mainstream, surrogacy, IVF, and reproductive rights are all popular by a wide margin. But the church really took a hard stance against it here, and I want to talk about why, because simple bigotry isn’t a good explanation. The church dislikes science in general (see flying people, talking animals, young earth creationism) and it especially dislikes science that is provable and accessible to a majority of people. Conception is a big deal in the catholic church, it’s a miracle! Except, it isn’t, and when science can readily do what “only god can do” but better, then that is a problem that science not only exists, but consistently can disprove the church. You can’t disprove something that doesn’t exist, so while we can say of course Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, didn’t fly into heaven, wasn’t born of a virgin, no one is spending time, money, or energy proving that. People are spending time, energy, and money to start a family. And if god sits up in heaven with souls like lightning bolts he throws at fertilized eggs, then the church needs to keep that as a special, miraculous, magical thing. But science can do it, and do it for people where god, thoughts, and prayers have all failed. The church also has a plethora of reasons for needing to control peoples’ sex lives, but that is a whole separate topic. So, this “abomination” from the church’s perspective is wonderful and life-changing for those who are unable to conceive through other means, and it isn’t a miracle, it’s just scientific progress. Kind of suggesting that the church doesn’t really know what it’s talking about, and that perhaps if they get this wrong, they are wrong about other things as well. 

So, yeah, it’s a terrible document that really isn’t a huge surprise, except maybe in how far back the church wants to drag society. Especially not shocking that a group of old, white men who have never had (heterosexual or consensual) sex might get a bit wrong about reproductive biology. But it is interesting to see the church just go so blatant with “science is bad, let’s go back to the dark ages when we were in charge” as a clear statement. They literally talk about violence against women being wrong, and then in the next paragraph say abortion should be banned, no exceptions for rape or incest. It’s incredibly tone-deaf, but again, fascinating to see how they are going to try to hold onto power through fear and emotional manipulation. They don’t even cite the bible or try to use scripture to ground any of this, it’s literally just them stating their opinion. A decree of self-importance from a group that still fights against children who were sexually abused in the church while protecting the abusers. What a wild time to be alive.

My hope, if I may be so bold on such a depressing topic, is that like the religious right wing political movement, these unpopular, unscientific, unloving moves will continue to shrink the church’s influence and attendance. With no sense of irony, the final line of the document is a quotation from Pope Francis: “I appeal to everyone throughout the world not to forget this dignity which is ours. No one has the right to take it from us.” No one, including the catholic church, has a right to say some people have dignity while others do not.