Today, more than before, in the name of freedom and democracy, we are publicly demanding our rights. Wherever we are and whoever we are, we want to assert ourselves. We want everyone to know that we exist and have a right to live the way we want.

Little do we realise, though, that before we are black or white, men or women, heterosexuals, homosexuals or transgenders, we are human beings, made in the image and likeness of God. Herein lies our dignity and the reason for our very existence.

By all means let us ensure the physical and mental integrity of every person. Let us protect every individual from being discriminated on grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, colour and religion. But let us not lose sight of our dignity. Let us guard our fragile and sinful nature. Let there be laws that help us nourish and live our life as beings made in the image and likeness of God.

Apparently, the State seems to exist only to ensure that our economy is sound and that our social and environmental surroundings are healthy.

But what about the moral order? Who is going to protect what Pope Benedict XVI, when he was still a cardinal, termed as our “spiritual ecology”?

When speaking about pollution of the environment Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger emphatically stated: “They (ecological movements) crusade with an understandable and also legitimate passion against the pollution of the environment, whereas man’s self-pollution of his soul continues to be treated as one of the rights of his freedom.

“Instead of making it possible to breathe humanly again, we defend with a totally false conception of freedom everything that man’s arbitrary desire produces.” (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, ‘Salt of the Earth’, An interview with Peter Seewald).

Before fighting for our rights and focusing on ourselves egoistically, let us therefore delve into the real nature of our existence as human beings.

Only then, imbibed with the spirit of God, can we sincerely fight for the right to live as dignified human persons.