The Vatican made headlines this month with its release of Dignitatis Personae
(Latin for "The Dignity of the Person"), which updated Catholic teachings on
bioethics and reaffirmed opposition to the cloning, killing and manipulating of
human embryos.

Critics have blasted the document as proof of the church's inexplicable
fixation on embryos. They ask: Why devote such energy to defending the rights
of a microscopic dot? Why throw up roadblocks to the Brave New World of biotech
advances — including the detection and destruction of genetically flawed
embryos in pursuit of so-called designer babies — to save infinitesimal
entities no one will miss? What's with the embryo obsession?

As the December release of the Dignitatis Personae suggests, the answer has a
lot to do with the Christmas story that the world's 2 billion Christians
commemorate today. That answer is grounded in a high view of the human body
that leads inexorably to a high view of the human embryo.

Both are countercultural in our modern world. Since the 17th century, when
philosopher Rene Descartes issued his trademark line, "I think, therefore I
am," we increasingly have accepted the idea that our minds are synonymous with
our selves and that our bodies merely are the matter that our minds inhabit,
with no intrinsic meaning or purposes of their own. Following this logic, we
claim the right to do what we wish with our bodies as persons who reason and
exercise will. The only caveat is that we may not hurt anyone else — anyone,
that is, who counts as a person with the same qualities of rationality and
autonomy.

These assumptions reflect a dualistic worldview that denigrates the body, and
they are rampant today. They underlie everything from our obsession with
redesigning our bodies through cosmetic surgery to our flippant attitudes about
sex and our growing acceptance of euthanasia for the demented and comatose.

These ideas also shape our debates over beginning-of-life issues. Supporters of
legalized abortion dismiss concerns about the killing of a fetus by arguing
that "it's just a blob of tissue." Backers of embryonic stem cell research say
we need not trouble ourselves over the destruction of an embryo because "it's
just a clump of cells." Reason alone can refute these claims. The human embryo,
like the human fetus, is a separate, self-directing individual who looks
exactly as a human person should look in her earliest stages of life, exactly
as each of us looked at her age. The size, location and frailty of her body do
not change the two fundamental facts we need to know to determine if she has a
right to life: She is human, and she is alive.

Although reasoned arguments are sufficient to defend these nascent human lives,
the Christian faith professed by more than three-quarters of Americans offers
additional grounds to do so. That faith says that God became incarnate in a
human body and passed through every stage of human development, including the
embryonic, to redeem human beings, body and soul. In doing so, he endowed the
human body in all its developmental stages with intrinsic dignity.

Polls show that a majority of Americans still believe the biblical Christmas
story: A Harris Interactive Survey released this month found that 71 percent
believe that Jesus is God or the Son of God and 61 percent believe in the
virgin birth. Dignitatis Personae is a timely reminder that there are
life-and-death implications to those beliefs and profound connections between
what we think about our bodies and what we think happened on that starry night
in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.