Dignitas Infinita highlights “the indispensable nature of the dignity of the human person in Christian anthropology” and warns of “ambivalent ways in which the concept is understood today.” Among those “ambivalent ways” are plural definitions of human dignity in official Catholic teaching. There is ambivalence in definitions of Catholic sexual human dignity and Catholic social human dignity, which lead to inconsistencies in the foundation and justification of moral doctrine. In this article, we first present Catholic definitions of social and sexual human dignity. Second, we explain Pope Francis’s anthropological nuances that provide an alternative definition of human dignity, which we label holistic human dignity. Third, we evaluate and describe the harm deriving from statements in the document and by Pope Francis, a harm that results from inconsistent definitions of human dignity in doctrinal teaching.

There is a long-noted anthropological and methodological divide between Catholic social and sexual ethics. We argue in three cumulative sections that Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia moves towards an anthropological and methodological integration of Catholic social teaching and Catholic sexual teaching. First, we explore Amoris Laetitia’s anthropological integration of Catholic social and Catholic sexual teaching; second, we explore its methodological integration of Catholic social and sexual teaching; finally, we demonstrate how the anthropological and methodological insights of Amoris Laetitia might provide a more integrated and credible response to a contemporary ethical issue.

This essay uses practical theology as a method to investigate the disconnect between church teaching on divorce and remarriage without an annulment and the lived experience of the faithful, and argues for a reformulation of the doctrine. First, it presents the interrelationship between sociology and the sensus fidelium as a methodological framework for doing practical

The article proposes a Catholic ethical method for the 21st century. To that end, the authors first address the magisterium’s concerns with relativism and distinguish relativism from Bernard Lonergan’s perspectivism. After proposing perspectivism as an epistemological tool that accounts for a plurality of Catholic ethical methods, the authors explore virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, and a

The article examines critical factors that determined the impact, reception, and implementation of Vatican II in Africa. Drawing on historical accounts, the author identifies and analyzes personalities, contexts, and issues that conditioned and shaped Africa’s participation in the council. Looking back 50 years, he argues that while the continent’s participation was negligible, shaped by a

[Social scientific research, here only briefly summarized, discriminates between nuptial cohabitors, who have already made the commitment to marry, and non-nuptial cohabitors, who have not made that commitment. It further shows that for nuptial cohabitors their cohabitation is the first step in their becoming married, that their characteristics are more like the characteristics of married