There are phrases that are said to reassure and that, nevertheless, open a breach through which the very unease they intended to close can pass entirely; phrases that the speaker utters with the nonchalance of someone leaving a door ajar in a house they believe to be empty, without noticing that the house belongs to everyone and that through that crack, along with the air, anyone passing by can slip in.
Cardinal José Cobo, Archbishop of Madrid, has granted Religión Digital a long, cordial interview, full of tortilla and ham —he will offer them to the Pope, he confides, because he knows he likes them—, and in the midst of that atmosphere of an open home and a laid table he has let slip one of those ajar doors. Asking, as so many good people do, that we overcome polarization and commit to the common good, he added that we must go “in search of human dignity, and redefine it with the criteria of our time.”
Redefine it. With the criteria of our time.
It is worth pausing, because this is not a scrupulous theologian’s subtlety nor an idle grammarian’s obsession. It is, precisely, the verb that is superfluous in all of Christian anthropology, and it is superfluous in the way a single poisoned word is superfluous in an otherwise impeccable toast. The dignity of man, in the tradition the cardinal is charged with safeguarding, is not redefined because we do not define it: it precedes us. It is not an agreement that the assembly of each age reaches after deliberating on its preferences, but a datum prior to every assembly, founded on the fact that man was —words the Church has just repeated with solemnity— “willed, created, and loved by God.” So prior is it that neither the executioner who tramples it nor the century that ignores it can strip it from the one trampled; hence its greatness, and hence, precisely, that it admits no temporal criteria: what changes with the criteria of the time is called fashion, custom, legislation—never dignity.
I do not speak from hearsay. Just two years ago, in April 2024, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith itself published the declaration Dignitas infinita, a document that Infovaticana itself reproduced in full, and whose foundational gesture was precisely to shield the term against the use the cardinal has just made of it. There, four meanings of the word were distinguished—ontological, moral, social, existential—with a purpose the drafter did not bother to disguise: to clarify “certain equivocal uses” that lead, it warned, to “serious consequences.” Ontological dignity, the text said, is that which belongs to the person “by the mere fact of existing,” and “subsists beyond every circumstance.” Beyond every circumstance: also, one may suppose, beyond the criteria of our time, which are the most circumstantial of circumstances. Rome wrote an entire document to prevent dignity from being redefined, and two years later a cardinal proposes redefining it over a journalistic dessert, like someone recommending updating the furniture.
I will be fair, which is the only way to be formidable. It is entirely plausible—indeed, I venture to say, most probable—that Cobo did not intend to affirm such a thing. That in his mind “redefining dignity with the criteria of our time” meant merely finding new words for an old truth, translating into the language of the present a content that remains untouched, refreshing pastoral mediation without altering dogma. This is the charitable reading, and I endorse it as a hypothesis about his intention. But intentions are not published: phrases are. And a phrase, once uttered, no longer belongs to the one who said it but to whoever knows how to use it; it becomes, as Talleyrand warned of diplomats’ words, an instrument that the adversary sharpens better than its owner. Contemporary anthropological relativism—the kind that dissolves the family, that rebrands abortion as a right and euthanasia as compassion, that decrees that sex is a feeling—does not need a cardinal to embrace it. It is enough for a cardinal to lend it the verb. And “redefine,” in matters of dignity, is the verb it has been seeking for years, now served on an episcopal platter at no cost.
What is grave, moreover, is the company in which the word travels. For it does not arrive alone, but escorted by an entire rhetoric of concord that renders it almost imperceptible: overcoming polarization, committing to the common good, seeking points of encounter, speaking better of ourselves. Who could oppose that? And yet it is precisely beneath that music of good feelings that the contraband travels safely, because no one inspects the luggage of someone who smiles. We are invited not to inflame tensions, and whoever points out the problem is automatically aligned with the inflamed; we are asked for encounter, and signaling a doctrinal imprecision suddenly seems an act of hostility. This is how the device works: uncomfortable truth is reclassified as bad manners, and theological objection as a lack of dialoguing spirit. Chesterton, who foresaw all this when he was still young, wrote that a time would come when one would have to unsheathe the sword to prove that trees are green; we are in that time, except that now unsheathing the sword is itself considered a form of polarization.
The rest of the interview confirms the pattern, without reaching the same voltage. Cobo asserts that the trip “is not political” and immediately explains that the Pope “will speak of politics, though not of parties”; he states that Leo XIV will go to the Canary Islands “for the same reason Francis went to Lampedusa,” that is, for an unequivocally programmatic reason, while denying that there is a program. Regarding Cuelgamuros he declares himself without jurisdiction “neither at the origin nor at the end,” after acknowledging that he did “the work that was asked of me”: either there was agency or there was not, but both things at once do not fit even in a cardinal. And he slips in, in passing, that the Pope will see “the Church that is there, without further makeup, among other things because we have not even had time to apply makeup”—a delightful phrase, because it admits as normal habit what only haste has prevented this time. There is even a chronological slip the journalist did not correct: Zapatero’s appearance on June 2, four days before the Pope’s arrival, has nothing to do with Cuelgamuros but with the bailout of Plus Ultra, alleged influence peddling; yet in the narrative everything merges into the same haze of “political contingency” from which, the cardinal says, it is advisable to “lift one’s gaze” in order not to look.
Lift one’s gaze: the motto of the trip. A good motto, if it did not become, on certain lips, an elegant instruction never to lower it to the detail, where the devil dwells and also, at times, the truth. Because human dignity is not contemplated better from above, in the abstract, redefined according to the taste of the age; it is recognized from below, in the concrete migrant and in the concrete unborn and in the concrete elderly, whom it protects not because our time has so decided, but because our time, like all times, arrived late to a truth that was already there.
That a cardinal should forget this over dessert is human. That he should say it before the recorder, on the eve of receiving the successor of Peter, and that no one around him should correct him, is the true symptom. Not of a man who believes what he ought not— I have no reason to think so—but of a Spanish Church so anxious not to inflame tensions, so eager to speak well of itself, that it has ceased to hear when the essential slips away. The Pope, they say, will eat tortilla and ham. Let us hope someone warns him that, in the appetizer, they have redefined dignity.