“27. (Respect for the human person). Turning to practical and urgent consequences, the [Second Vatican Council] stresses respect for human beings such that individuals look upon each neighbor without exception as another self, paying particular attention to his and her life and what they need in order to live it in a worthy manner, so as not to imitate the rich man who had no concern for poor Lazarus.
Today particularly there is a pressing obligation on us to be a neighbour to every single individual and to take steps to serve each individual whom we encounter, whether she or he be old and abandoned, or a foreign worker unjustly despised, or an exile, or an illegitimate child innocently suffering for the sin of others, or a hungry person appealing to our conscience with the Lord’s words: “as you did it to one of the least of my brothers or sister, you did it to me” (Mt 25,40).
Moreover, whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in woman and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the creator.” – “Pastoral constitution on the church in the world of today,” – Second Vatian Council, December 7, 1965. My italics. How the Catholic theoconservatives who are so close to this administration have remained largely quiet about America’s new policy of torture is simply beyond my comprehension.
The Dish 