Memo to Tucho
Eminenza: Recently, you announced that you’re preparing yet another “very important document,” this time on “human dignity.” It will also address trends in contemporary society – “not only social issues but also a strong criticism of moral questions such as sex-change surgery, surrogacy, and gender ideology.” Which should allow “most people who are concerned” about your work “to be put at ease.”
Though I haven’t been formally invited to do so, please allow me a few words, in the speaking/listening Spirit of Synodality. We’re all part of a synodal Church now, aren’t we? (Though synodality seems to have been – temporarily? – suspended for the surprise “paradigm shift in theology” of Ad theologiam promovendam and “development of non-liturgical blessings” in Fiducia supplicans.)
For starters, don’t think that, in a major document about “human dignity,” you can simply rattle off dozens of pages about what every Catholic – indeed, what anyone brought up even in the fading Judaeo-Christian ethos of the West – believes about the value and sacredness of human beings. And that then you can invoke the Christian principle of “welcoming the stranger” to sneak in heterodoxy (about LGBTs) or to erode what remains of Christian societies by advocating for essentially limitless illegal immigration.
