Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines dignity as “the quality or state of being worthy of honor or respect.” We might also think of it as the minimum amount of respect owed to something. We intuitively know that not all things have the same degree of dignity. A book has a little more dignity than a brick because books convey ideas, but both of these inanimate objects have less inherent dignity than an animal which has life.

In 1624, the famous English poet John Donne wrote in his “Meditation 17” the famous lines: “…therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” Though originally written in prose, people now often arrange it as a poem entitled “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The poem discusses the universality of humanity, and the impact of the tragedy of anybody’s death to all of mankind. He implies that a person should mourn the death of even those they don’t know as a personal loss. In this way, Donne points to the inherent worth of every individual human being, an idea the Church calls “dignity.” Our bodies teach us that every human person deserves such dignity.

Source: William Marshall, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

An engraving of John Donne ( 1572 – 1631)

All of these things, however, have less dignity than human beings who share the image and likeness of God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church backs this up in paragraph 357 when it says, “Being in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone,” and again in paragraph 364 when it says, “The human body shares in the dignity of ‘the image of God’: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit.” Essentially, the Church teaches that human beings hold a special place in the order of Creation, a place made evident by our human bodies, which reveal us as individual persons.

So, what then should dignity lead us to do? Does Donne really want us to react with overwhelming grief to every human death? Of course not. We could not live like that. Nor should we dismiss the goodness of having strong relationships with specific people in our lives, or the goodness of belonging to different and distinct groups of people. Instead, John Donne wants us to have a greater awareness of our shared humanity. Pope Saint John Paul II put the same idea another way when he said, “None of us is alone in this world; each of us is a vital piece of the great mosaic of humanity as a whole.”  This means treating those we encounter every day with at least that minimum level of respect. Just because I don’t know someone doesn’t mean I don’t owe them the love of Jesus. I can know that this person deserves this, because they have a human body, which means that God made them in His image and likeness.

With inherent human dignity in mind, let’s remember to treat everybody we meet with charity and to pray for those who will die today.

The full text of the poem