What does the centurion mean when he says, “I am not worthy,” and how does that speak to how God sees that all he created was good? Fr. Mike Schmitz writes that the Church has always taught the universal goodness of the universe and human dignity. Where does “our” goodness come from? The Church teaches that all of our goodness comes from God. Not some of it, but all of it. God is the source of everything that is good in us. I cannot overemphasize this point. If we start claiming dignity or worth as our own apart from God, we wander into a very dangerous trap. When we repeat the phrase “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,” we are not speaking of our worth in relation to other human beings. We are talking about our worth in comparison to God himself. Because all of our goodness comes from God, human dignity is something we can scarcely imagine. But this does not make us even close to becoming equals with God. We are not talking about being worthy of just and honorable treatment by another human being, being worthy of respect and equality in the community in which we live, or being worthy of the love of the people around us. We are talking about whether we believe God “owed it to us” that we deserved that he should die for us. We are talking about whether we deserved that God “emptied himself and took the form of a slave … [and] obediently accepted … death on a cross!” We are dangerously close to asserting that we are so worthy that the Lord of the Universe ought to humble himself to the point of becoming our food. I am not worthy of that. God is so good, however, that he offers me this. Remember, pride is still the deadliest of the deadly sins. And pride that is simply dressed up as “self-worth” remains deadly. Compared with God, I am not worthy, yet his goodness desires to bridge the gap between his worthiness and our unworthiness, which is why we continue, “but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.”