Women for the World | The Culture Project and Human Dignity

At Cathedral, we define a woman for the world as a woman who knows and cultivates her God-given gifts and shares those gifts with the world. As part of the “Women for the World” speaker series, young missionaries from the Culture Project shared analogies, anecdotes, explanations of natural law, and scientific evidence to deepen our students' understanding of human dignity. 

The Culture Project is an initiative of young people set out to restore culture through the experience of virtue. The speakers are trained by faithful experts in the fields of medicine, psychology, philosophy, and theology and are equipped to discuss these important topics with knowledge and understanding. Our two visiting missionaries, Claudia and Reese, began their presentation by describing the miracle of each student’s life: from the uniqueness of her DNA patterns to the incredibly complex life process before birth, like her heart starting to beat after 5 weeks and her toes developing after 9 weeks. Reese reiterated, “Your unique unrepeatability is not an accident but a gift.” 

Using her experience of skydiving, Claudia set up the following hypothetical situation to describe the difference in the value of objects and human persons: 

Does your phone have value? How much is it worth? Imagine that you are skydiving and your phone drops from the plane, shattering into a trillion pieces… now does it have value? It’s not worth anything!

Now imagine that Reese accidentally falls out of the plane and proceeds to break both arms, both legs, and his neck… does he still have value? His worth has not changed.

This analogy clearly demonstrates that although an object loses value when it breaks, a human person’s dignity and value never changes, no matter who they are or what happens to them. Using this framework, the speakers brought up past and current abuses of this inherent dignity. Cases of dehumanization, or treating someone as if they are less than human, include global issues such as slavery and genocide, as well as examples affecting our nation and communities, like bullying and gossiping, abortion, human trafficking, and pornography. 

Claudia explained that God, Who is Love, gives us our desire for love, and that love is the only proper response to a human person. Most often, instances of dehumanization like gossipping or pornography are rooted in a person’s grasping for love, but without respect for their own and others’ human dignity. Gossiping, Claudia explained, dehumanizes others because it seeks connection at the expense of another person, changing not only how others view that person but also how one views herself. Claudia also shared disturbing statistics about pornography: it is the third most common form of human trafficking, 88% of it depicts violence to women, and the industry produces more revenue than that of professional basketball, football, and baseball combined. Pornography reduces a person to an object to be used; as St. John Paul II explains: “The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little." 

The Culture Project missionaries discussed these tragedies against the human person with great delicacy and an emphasis on mercy, healing, hope, and forgiveness. Claudia and Reese encouraged our first-year students to make a positive difference in the world, beginning with choices to love and respect their own families, friends, and acquaintances. Each student must know her own dignity as the foundation for all healthy relationships with others, and so that each student can live the life of greatness and fulfillment for which she is made.

The two questions they left the students with are as follows: 

What kind of person do you want to be?

What kind of impact do you want to have in the world? 

By describing the abuses of human dignity in terms of man’s search for love, Claudia paved the way to emphasize the ultimate source of the human person’s fulfillment. As St. Augustine describes in Confessions, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” The Culture Project missionaries inspired Cathedral students to rejoice at the dignity of others—starting not later, but today!