My husband and I were traveling through the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York when we began reading Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical addressing artificial intelligence. “Read this part,” my husband told me, after spotting a quote he knew I’d like.
He pointed to the sentence in “Magnifica Humanitas” where Pope Leo writes: “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.”
The pope’s wording stayed with me when a popular content creator on YouTube, Jesse Ridgway, announced on social media that he and his wife had aborted their unborn baby boy. Ridgway said they made their decision after learning that their baby received a diagnosis — a diagnosis resulting from “an error.”
“This week, my wife and I made the very difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy due to Trisomy 21,” he wrote in a lengthy post in early June. “Trisomy 21, also known as Down Syndrome, is caused by an extra chromosome. It is caused by an error in cell division, like a glitch.”
Instead of a blessing, he said, Down syndrome is “objectively s–tty from a health perspective.”
Hopeful voices
His post went viral with tens of millions of people seeing his post on X alone. Many responded, including people with Down syndrome and parents of children with Down syndrome. They wanted people to know it was possible to choose the alternative: life. They encouraged people to focus on the capabilities of people with Down syndrome.
“For decades, society has sent people like me a dangerous message: that our lives are somehow less valuable, less meaningful, or less worthy than the lives of everyone else,” Collette Divitto, a woman with Down syndrome and the founder and CEO of a cookie company called Collettey’s Cookies, wrote in a piece published by The Hill. “The reality is very different.”
This moment, she added, “should force us to ask a much bigger question: Why are so many Americans still being told that disability means a life without opportunity?”
As a parent, Mark X. Cronin wrote about how he and his son John, who has Down syndrome, founded a socks company called John’s Crazy Socks.
“Parents facing this diagnosis deserve the full picture,” he wrote in an op-ed published by Long Island Life & Politics. “They deserve to hear about the medical challenges, yes. They also deserve to hear about the joy, the humor, the love, the contribution, the irreplaceable presence that a person with Down syndrome brings into the world.”
“We should never be blinded by a person’s limitations,” he added. “We should be awed by their possibilities.”
Limitations
After reading these responses, I continued reading “Magnifica Humanitas” hoping to find further insight. I found Pope Leo’s comments about the right to life from the moment of conception. I also read what he had to say about humanity’s so-called limitations.
“Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today,” he writes. “Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.”
He adds: “And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.”
His words suggest the truth that none of us is perfect, and that that is part of being human. Our imperfections are human, and they can also lead us to become better humans. At the same time — no matter where we are in our journey — each of us has dignity.
Infinite love
“The dignity of every human being can be described as infinite, as Saint John Paul II stated, for two reasons,” Pope Leo writes, citing St. John Paul II’s 1980 address to people with disabilities. First of all, that is “because the love of God, who calls us to friendship with him, is infinite; and second, his love is absolutely unconditional, in the sense that, even if we search endlessly, we will never find anything that can erase or deny it.”
Disability or not, every human person has limitations. And disability or not, every human person has inherent dignity. Our worth does not depend on being “perfect”; we need only exist. We may have what some consider errors because we are finite, but we have human dignity because we are infinitely loved.
Katie Yoder writes for OSV News from Maryland.
