I agree with Ramesh that Damon Linker’s piece is interesting, but in the space of his first five paragraphs Linker makes two critical mistakes:

Mistake one: “From the beginning of his papacy,” Linker writes, “John Paul claimed that human rights had to be grounded in an absolute (inviolable, unconditional) notion of human dignity that derives from God.”

Linker seems to believe that John Paul concerned himself with human rights as a theoretical matter, arguing about the way in which rights had or did not have to be grounded in order to be sustained. But John Paul believed that human rights simply are grounded in the absolute. He was describing reality, not constructing political theories.

Mistake two: “John Paul,” Linker continues, “convinced many American conservatives that the union of sperm and ovum instantly produces a unique person who possesses the same dignity (and thus rights) as a mature human being….”

Wrong again. As the New York theologian Mgr. Lorenzo Albacete points out, the critical Vatican documents on the earliest stages of human life avoid the term “person.” It is human life, in and of itself, that possesses dignity, whether or not endowed with rationality, a soul (on the question of when or how the soul is infused, the Church is silent), or other attributes of personhood.