The human person is created out of love, for love and is destined to flourish. God, who is perfect love, has created each person in the image and likeness of God. Each person is unique and equal in dignity to all others. Persons are rational and free beings having both a body and a soul. Human beings are in relationship to all of God's creation. God has made each person in the Divine image and likeness as an inseparable unity of body, mind and spirit. God gifts each individual with absolute and enduring dignity and the unconditional love of God. Through God the human person has the possibility of life lived to the full.

Each human being is unique and fundamentally equal to all other human beings. This is the case regardless of place and time, regardless of the development or expression of any specific abilities, regardless of any other features, physical or otherwise. The reason for this is that every human being is created, known, called and loved eternally by God (Psalm 139:13).

The body is good. We affirmed above that the human being is good, not in a moral sense, but in the sense that it is good that any particular human exists. The same is true for the body as part of that human being created in the image of God. In other words, because we are created in the image of God as bodily beings, the human body constitutes part of what gives humans their fundamental and equal dignity or worth. The goodness, worth and dignity of the body, of our human flesh, is further affirmed by Catholic belief in the Incarnation. The idea that God chose to become a human being, to enter into the limitations of a specific human body in a specific time and place, gives a profound meaning to our fleshiness. God has chosen to become like us in every way but sin, and in so doing saved us from the limitations of this fleshiness of ours. Through the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus, we are freed from death as the ultimate limitation of our bodily existence. Jesus is raised not as a spirit. Jesus is raised with a glorified body. In other words, our very bodiliness is part of our future as much as it is part of our present.