d, man, his dignity, freedom, greatness and power have never been spoken about so much, on the other hand, he has never been so trampled under foot, subjected to dreadful massacres, and humiliated by violence, especially by the powerful.12 World wars, fratricidal wars (which every war is because "every man is my brother") and tribal wars are a dark chapter in history, and still more the attacks made on the weakest and the innocent, a category of persons who are trampled on in so many ways.13 Since ancient times, it has been thought that man is characterized by his reason. Euripides thus stated that "the intellect is God in each one of us".14 Along the same lines, Plato 15 and Aristotle 16 chose reason as the distinctive human faculty. After Boethius' well-known, "Individua substantia rationis naturae", St. Thomas Aquinas continued in this direction and recognized that man is a person and that this is what is most perfect in the whole of nature: perfectissimum in omni natura. Man is a living, bodily and spiritual being; he is a structured whole. He is distinctum subsistens in intellectuali natura.
13. The concepts of person and dignity are related to one another but not identical. The person refers to being in its highest degree of perfection with its three characteristics of subsistence, spirituality and totality. Dignity refers first to a quality of being, a value that can be opposed to a countervalue. Every person as such has an innate dignity that must be recognized and respected.17 However, the personal being, as a free and evolving being, is called to take on another dignity by developing his or her human possibilities. In this sense, a person also has an acquired dignity that is attained as one perfects in the human order.
14. As the image of God, man has been created through an act of love. God wanted to give man a nature that was different from the whole created order. Man stands out among the other created beings; he transcends them. We all share in existence in a personal way through God the Creator himself. As a personal creature endowed with reason and free will and called to eternal happiness, each human being reflects something of divine magnificence. This is the ultimate, indispensable foundation of our brotherhood.
15. The family is the pre-eminent, most favorable and irreplaceable place for the recognition and development of a personal being on its way to complete dignity. In the family the first steps in human development are taken. In it one is forged not only in the maternal uterus but, as St. Thomas points out, in a "spiritual uterus".18 In this family and formational context, the process of education and promotion of a human being begins. A person who does not receive this initial promotion in the family will be greatly hampered in achieving the human fullness to which heshe is called as a person.
2.2. The Family: the Basis of Society
16. Respect for human rights is necessary for the human development of persons in the community. These values include life itself, health, knowledge, work, the community and religion. Above all, "the family is in fact a community of persons whose proper way of existing and living together is communion: communio personarum".19 The values essential to the family can only be achieved when a man and a woman give themselves to one another totally in marriage, a community of love and life, and are willing to fully accept the gift of new life in procreation and in education. Parents give that new life a home in which the child can grow and develop. All the rights that are necessary by nature for the development of the person in hisher wholeness become real in the family in the most effective way. The family, by its very nature, is a subject of rights, the foundational element of human society, and the most necessary force in the full development of the human person. The importance of the family's social mediation is undeniable. This is something that maintains all its value, despite the changes that have affected the family over the course of history.
17. Since all men are pe