Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition by Donald Dietrich

Author:Donald Dietrich [Dietrich, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780765803788
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-28T04:00:00+00:00

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Catholics began to explore the “rights discourse” launched by Leo XIII to protect individuals from the aggressive industrial and mass society that had authoritarian/totalitarian exploitative potential. For centuries Catholics had cultivated a natural law tradition that deductively postulated objective norms for society. The natural rights tradition, however, was focused on individuals and was seen by the church as the impetus of the French Revolution with its stress on democracy and liberalism, both of which were ideologies that confronted the premodern nineteenth-century church. From the late nineteenth century onward, however, Catholics had more creatively begun to explore the issues connected to natural rights. The first stage in the development of a Catholic human rights stance can be detected during the reign of Leo XIII, who in 1891 issued his famous encyclical (Rerum Novarum) on the condition of the working class in industrial society. Along with a vigorous affirmation of the natural, i.e., human, right to own property and a denunciation of the Marxist notion of class struggle as the essence of historical and materialistic development, Leo supported the more expansive “natural right” of each person “to procure what is required in order to live.” He fused this concept with his premodern, neoscholastic, and natural law argument for a just or living wage and against the unrestricted power of employers to exploit the workers. He hoped to construct a moral foundation for the nucleus of a theory of subsistence rights, in which humans had rights to the necessities for survival. Such foundational rights he saw as prior to any particular political, legal, or economic order: “Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the sustenance of his body.”41 The state became the created community. A person’s rights trumped those of the state.

Leo’s stress on the primacy of the person in society as distinct from the “individual” of the Enlightenment added creatively to the Catholic church’s teachings on economic rights. The distinctions between person and individual, slow to develop, were not fully perceived until Catholics confronted the horrors of the Nazi period.42 Leo was more prepared, of course, to challenge economic liberalism and the practices of laissez-faire capitalism with the Catholic perspective of a hierarchical and traditionalist model than to embrace egalitarian democracy and the political protection of rights inherent in a person’s dignity. Nevertheless, he did create openness toward modernity, even though his encyclicals in many areas seem to hearken back to medieval and premodern philosophical models.

The next stage of the Catholic engagement in the “rights conversation” was not marked by one central document, but consisted in Catholicism’s gradual acceptance of the values, procedures, and norms of Western constitutional democracy as a fruitful framework for discourse in modern societies. This acceptance involved a turn to history and to the centrality of human dignity. Such a turn seems to be a result of a painful process of learning from the great European civil war of 1914–1945, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. More

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