Adriana Quiroz Zapata was tortured and raped by Colombian police and sought refuge in the United States. She did not find it. Having failed to deport her to Mexico, ICE sent her instead to the Congo, a place where she has no linguistic or ethnic ties and one of the poorest countries in the world, where 70 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty. Zapata has no possible future there; we have abandoned her. 

Marie-Thérèse Rosse-Mahé’s story is less harrowing but still disgraceful. After the death of her American husband, the eighty-five-year-old French citizen and Alabama resident was following the legal pathway to a green card when she was seized at night, handcuffed in her pajamas, and sent to a detention center where she recalls being constantly yelled at amid fellow detainees who were treated “like dogs, not in a human way.” 

In a human way. There is a lot of power in those words. To treat someone in a human way is to treat them with dignity. The Trump administration is engaged in a systematic denial of human dignity. In its sadistic detentions and “third-country” deportations, its criminal bombings in the Caribbean, its delight in the deaths of innocent Iranians, there is a clear throughline: a rejection of the idea that we must treat all people in a human way.

A central task of any person of goodwill—and certainly of any Catholic committed to the Church’s moral teaching—is to uphold dignity and stand with the downtrodden. Yet the Trump administration’s contempt for dignity has appealed to some Catholic intellectuals. While they may not support all—or any—of the regime’s violations of human dignity, their dissent from Church teaching can help shed light on its importance and on why we so desperately need to recover it in the face of MAGA’s cruelty.

In 2021, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last year, gave a speech at Notre Dame that caused a stir among Catholic intellectuals. In it, he called into question human dignity, arguing that the concept, in modern usage at least, lacked concrete content. It was an abstract placeholder for a group of negative rights created by intellectuals and policymakers after the horrors of World War II. Its abstraction and vagueness were virtues to the midcentury international organizations looking for a term different nations, cultures, and religions could accept. But since it was contentless, according to MacIntyre, it lacked intellectual force. And since it was merely negative—in proscribing what should not be done to people—it could undermine the commitment to concrete duties necessary for achieving the common good. 

Because it dictates merely what you may not do to people, MacIntyre argued, dignity is insufficient to ground the type of social care we ought to give. For example, many pro-lifers are committed to the abstract dignity of the unborn, but they overlook the impoverished mothers in their midst who lack the support needed to raise children. 

MacIntyre, a Catholic shaped by his engagement with Marx, was not a MAGA intellectual. His argument included, for one thing, an appeal to a system of justice that would provide universal health care. Nevertheless, his speech inspired celebrations among “postliberal” Catholics. Theologian C. C. Pecknold celebrated the shift away from the idea of dignity as “something inviolably equal in all.” Political philosopher Patrick Deneen delighted in MacIntyre’s bombshell casting aside dignity as a liberal abstraction. Integralist Rafael de Arízaga posited that we could now replace dignity and human rights with a justice-based approach of “saying what is each person’s due in a particular case.” 

To be sure, MacIntyre’s argument is not without its strengths: the conservative insistence on place, real rather than abstract relations, and morality grounded in the practices of a community. MacIntyre is right that dignity talk can drift into abstraction, especially among the “world citizens” of liberal modernity. Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant understood dignity as inhering in rational beings as such, independent of the communal nature of actual humans. Likewise, in the liberal social-contract tradition stemming from John Locke, dignity tends to ride along with individual autonomy, without any regard for the common good. We are just rational machines consenting to particular social and political relations. 

The strange thing about MacIntyre—one of the great theorists of tradition—and the various traditionalists who celebrated his lecture, is their detachment from the living tradition they claim to belong to, the Catholic Church. They reject modern liberal theory and root themselves in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, but they tend to neglect the Church’s developing doctrine over the last half century. Just as much as the liberal moderns they criticize, they risk dispatching a core principle of the Magisterium.

Dignity is not optional for Catholics. The Catholic tradition proclaims with John Paul II “the Gospel of the dignity of the person” and thus that “every threat to human dignity and life must necessarily be felt in the Church’s very heart.” It is the Catholic tradition that produced a conciliar decree titled Dignitatis humanae. That tradition has the great resource of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which proclaims, “a just society can become a reality only when it is based in respect of the transcendent dignity of the human person.” Pope Leo reaffirms this teaching in his recent encyclical Magnifica humanitas, where he denounces and apologizes for slavery.

MacIntyre proposes not to jettison dignity completely but to return to a more Thomistic version of the concept, one that is fundamentally teleological. He also wants to turn toward justice, the virtue that renders onto others what is owed: punishment or reward for specific actions, with attention paid to concrete relationships within families, neighborhoods, and polities. Our dignity lies in our nature’s goal of communion with God. Because it is a goal, we can fail in achieving it and thus our dignity can be lost. As Aquinas puts it, “an evil man is worse than a beast.”  

But MacIntyre gets at least two things wrong here. First, one’s teleological nature cannot be lost. You may fail to achieve your end, but it remains a part of you. More importantly, dignity is not only in our telos but also in our origin. Thus, for Benedict XVI, “it is based on man’s creation ‘in the image of God’ (Gen 1:27), a datum which gives rise to the inviolable dignity of the human person and the transcendent value of natural moral norms.” Thus, human dignity arises from the central reality of the human person: we image the divine. The danger of excessively Aristotelian (and for that matter Marxist) teleological accounts is that they neglect our origin. Our dignity is inalienable not only because we are made toward God but because we are also made from God. These two features (which are really one and the same feature of us as imago dei) cannot be lost. To lose either would be to cease being human, which is impossible given our nature as immortal souls with bodies destined to be resurrected. 

Thus, Gaudium et spes rejects abstraction by teaching that “the root reason for human dignity lies in man’s call to communion with God,” and that “this dignity is rooted and perfected in God.” Where MacIntyre thinks modern dignity is an abstract placeholder, the Church teaches that it is one of the fundamental concrete principles of the human person. MacIntyre is right that the Church thinks its understanding of dignity can be put into fruitful dialogue with more abstract versions, but he’s wrong that this shows the concept’s weakness. Catholics need not, as MacIntyre seems to assume, reduce their own understanding of dignity to the secular liberal’s thinner, more abstract conception; they can work to convince their secular friends that a thicker conception of human nature is needed to ground the kind of dignity liberals are already committed to. We can also work with others whose foundational reasons may be different, but who share the desire to uphold justice and defend the smallest and the most forgotten.

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith affirmed in its 2024 Dignitas infinita that “every human person possesses an infinite dignity.” Some scoffed, claiming that God alone is infinite. But human dignity images the infinite God and is expressed in our capacity for union with God which no other creature has. This infinite dignity cannot be lost since it is “inalienably grounded” in the very being of a human “which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation.” While our dignity is directed toward God, it is not lost when we lose that direction. As a sinner, an evil man may be worse than a beast, but as a human he never is. This is precisely why Augustine insisted we keep separate sin and humanness.

Dignitas infinita states that “from this truth [about infinite dignity], the Church draws the reasons for her commitment to the weak and those less endowed with power.” In other words, dignity grounds our commitment to the marginalized and powerless. Those commitments do not arise from “what is owed” to the poor in a particular social context, nor do they arise from a merely abstract principle. We must engage concretely with the situation of the hungry, the unborn, the imprisoned, and the foreign because of their concrete, God-given dignity. Dignity is not determined by juridical or political relations, by standing in a society, by merit or guilt. This is why it is so important in the pro-life movement. The unborn have not earned anything except to be treated in a human way. But dignity is not some kind of bare minimum or limiting principle either. No human is a bare minimum; we are a manifestation of the glory of God whose flourishing requires a collection of goods—the preservation and improvement of life, the fostering of family, our social existence, and our search for God. To withhold those goods is to deny dignity.

MacIntyre was one of the most thoughtful critics of the weakness of the role played by human rights in mainstream liberal political philosophy. He is right that, as merely negative precepts, these rights lack a sufficient account of what it means to be human and thus what it means to have shared common goods. But here again it is notable that he, and his MAGA appropriators, miss what the Magisterium has to say. St John Paul II richly articulates the positive reality of negative precepts. In Evangelium vitae, he teaches that “the negative moral precepts have an extremely important positive function” in affirming the inviolable dignity of the person. What you may not do to someone tells you a lot about them. John Paul II grounds the Church’s approach to negative precepts in three intersecting principles: natural law, human dignity, and the Ten Commandments. As he teaches, the precept “‘You shall not kill’ is strongly negative…. Implicitly, however, it encourages a positive attitude of absolute respect for life.” 

Catholic dignity discourse positively affirms what is owed to people simply because they are people. Thus, the Church affirms that we should do more for the unborn than simply not kill them; we should provide mothers and babies with robust social support. Likewise, we should do more than admit migrants who are then forced into the darkest corners of our society; we should welcome them with paths forward to integration, employment, and citizenship. We should recognize their dignity in a way that advances our common good.

Dignity offers a moral framework to determine what we owe to all people, to people with whom we have little connection (migrants), and to people who have committed some form of wrong (prisoners, those condemned to death). It is particularly oriented toward those in need and those on the outside of my community. Dignity matters for the outsider precisely because they find themselves excluded from the contexts—families, neighborhoods, states—MacIntyre emphasizes. In other words, it is particularly oriented toward the kind of people the Trump administration has targeted.

The Trump administration explicitly separates the worthy from the unworthy. White “heritage Americans” will have their dignity defended, while migrants and Iranian schoolchildren can be degraded. After the slaughter of Iranian children, while their families were still searching for their bodies, Pete Hegseth bragged about raining “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” The federal government is rushing to bring back the death penalty and even restoring execution by firing squad. 

Haitians are accused of eating dogs while their protected status is ripped away and they’re threatened with deportation to a collapsed state. Somalians are called “garbage” while ICE agents patrol their neighborhoods with military-grade weapons. Afghanis who fought with us were slated to be deported to Congo, a country with which they have no linguistic, religious, or ethnic connection. Similarly, Iranian refugees are to be sent to the Central African Republic, the same country the State Department says Americans should not travel to “for any reason.” How can you cast aside allies or refugees like that? Only when they are not considered full human beings. Even Trump’s throwaway comments celebrating the deaths of Robert Mueller or Rob and Michele Reiner indicate a contempt for the principles of human dignity. Worst of all is the Trump-ordered direct killing of more than two hundred people in the Caribbean and Pacific. Accused of running drugs, they were murdered without due process or any concern for their humanity.

Responding to the American treatment of migrants, Pope Leo called on believers and all people of good will to “seek ways of treating people with humanity, with the dignity that is theirs.” Those keen to dismiss dignity as an empty category or as mere liberalism need to do a lot more listening. While MacIntyre’s thought is inimical to Trumpism, his Catholic appropriators are carrying intellectual water for a noxious regime while tossing aside Church teaching. May I propose they listen not only to the Magisterium, but also to the degraded, denied, detained, and deported. They could start with the migrants trapped in detention centers, those whom the Vicar of Christ says need to be treated with the dignity that is theirs. 

Marie-Thérèse Rosse-Mahé listened to them. She had supported Trump and his anti-migrant politics. But in the detention center, where she saw them treated like dogs, she learned something from them. Those treated without dignity by the administration treated her with it. With only her pajamas to wear and worsening sciatica, she struggled to lie down or get to the bathroom. Fellow detainees—those she’d thought deserved to be deported—helped her to the bathroom and back to her bed. After her ordeal was over, she said, “I found God in that jail through those women.” God stands with those whose dignity is denied. We should stand with them too.

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