Situación patrimonial. Balance

On 10th December, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in which it declared thirty basic rights and freedoms to which all humans should subscribe as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.364 The Church has also spoken out strongly on the issue of human rights and linked them to the concept of human dignity. This is particularly the case with documents from the Second Vatican Council on. Thus, in his “Address to the International Catholic Commission for Migration” of 12 November 2001 John Paul II argues forcibly that from the concept of the dignity of the human person

there flows a sense of inalienable rights which do not depend on any human power to concede or deny; they are rights which have their source in God.”365

362 _{Compendium, #201.}

363 _{US Catholic Bishops, “Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy”,}

summarised in O’Brien, Catholicism, 1006.

364

United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This has been supplemented by the UN’s

International Bill of Human Rights.

Similarly in Pacem in Terris John XXIII refers to human rights not only as inalienable but also as universal and inviolable. The three adjectives – inalienable, universal and inviolable – are significant because they clearly indicate the source of human rights - God. Thus human rights are universal because they are present in all human beings in whatever time, place or situation; they are inviolable because they are rooted in human dignity; they are inalienable because no-one can legitimately deprive another person of these rights without doing violence to that person’s human nature.366

Because human beings are generally social beings and live in community human rights are indissolubly linked to human obligations or responsibilities to one another. Indeed the two – rights and responsibilities - exist in mutual complementarity. “In human society to one man’s right there corresponds a duty in all other persons: the duty, namely, of acknowledging and respecting the right in question”.367 To this statement Pacem in Terris adds that there is an essential contradiction involved when rights are affirmed without acknowledgement of their corresponding responsibilities. The encyclical warns that “[t]hose … who claim their own rights, yet altogether forget or neglect to carry out their respective duties, are people who build with one hand and destroy with the other.”368

As early as 1891 Leo XIII enunciated various economic rights of each person.369 As the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace points out, the movement within the Church towards the identification and proclamation of human rights was also very much

366 _{These insights come from the Compendium, #152.} 367 _{Pacem in Terris, #264.}

368

Idem.

369

Rerum Novarum, #5, #16 and #29. Forty years later Quadragesimo Anno continued this discussion of economic rights in relation to the human dignity of each person.

influenced in the immediate aftermath of World War II by the displacement of thousands of people in Europe as well as by the United Nations General Assembly’s promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.370

With John XXIII’s publication of Pacem in Terris in 1963 came a much more comprehensive statement by the Magisterium of human rights and responsibilities. What stands out about this encyclical’s treatment of human rights and responsibilities is its grouping and explicit listing of them, together with its linking of them to the concept of human dignity.371 It lists individual and group rights that include the right to life and a worthy standard of living, rights pertaining to moral and cultural values, the right to worship God according to one’s conscience, the right to choose freely one’s state of life, economic rights, the right of meeting and association, the right to emigrate and immigrate and, finally, political rights.372

This categorization of human rights is followed by a corollary listing and grouping of duties which are reciprocal to the rights of each human being and which also find their source in the God-given dignity of people. John XXIII argues forcefully that not only is it the duty of each person to claim their rights “as marks of [their] dignity” but that “[o]ne of the fundamental duties of civil authorities … is to coordinate social relations in such

370 _{Compendium , #152.}

371 _{This point is made by O’Brien & Shannon, Catholic Social Thought, 129, and by the Compendium,}

#156. I believe it is the reason lying behind Cornish’s assertion, in The Call to Hospitality, 11, that Pacem

in Terris contains “a manifesto of human rights unparalleled in the documents of the social doctrine” of the

Church.

fashion that the exercise of one man’s rights does not threaten others in the exercise of their own rights nor hinder them in the fulfilment of their duties.”373

Two years later the Second Vatican Council reinforced the human rights and duties statements of Pacem in Terris in Gaudium et Spes, asserting that the common good of each and every person within society “involves rights and duties with respect to the whole human race.” In the document’s enunciation of these specific rights and duties the Council expanded upon the listing given in Pacem in Terris.

There must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a family; the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect, to appropriate information, to activity in accord with the upright norm of one’s own conscience, to protection of privacy, and to rightful freedom in matters religious too. … Hence, the social order and its development must unceasingly work to the benefit of the human person.374

This powerful statement of the Church in Council strongly focuses on the rights of each individual human person while, at the same time, stressing the interdependence of human beings and the responsibility that Christians have to ensure that the necessary means for a dignified life for each human being are provided, irrespective of their situation in life:

In our times a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbour of absolutely every person and of actively helping him when he comes across our path, whether he be an old person abandoned by all, a foreign labourer unjustly looked down upon, a refugee, a child born of an unlawful union and wrongly suffering for a sin he did not commit, or a hungry person who disturbs our conscience by recalling the voice of the Lord: ‘As long as you did it for one of these, the least of my brethren, you did it for me’ (Mt 25:40).375

As the 1978 letter to episcopal conferences from the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People makes clear, not only should the Church “make 373 Ibid., #44 and #62. 374 Gaudium et Spes, #26. 375 _{Ibid., #27.}

[herself] a prophetic voice heard wherever these rights are trampled on, and … work constantly and farsightedly to raise man up” but her concern for the rights of individuals should also extend to communities, groups and minorities.376

With such statements as the above, the Church recognizes that human rights include not just individual persons’ rights but the rights of people collectively living in all communities and nations. John Paul II’s letter on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War adds reinforcement with its words that international law “rests upon the principle of equal respect for States, for each people’s right to self-determination and for their free cooperation in view of the higher common good of humanity.”377 Each nation has

a fundamental right to existence, [to] its own language and culture, through which a people expresses and promotes … its fundamental ‘sovereignty’, [to] shape its life according to its own traditions, excluding, of course, every abuse of basic human rights and in particular the oppression of minorities, [to] build its future by providing an appropriate education for the younger generation.378

On the other hand, Redemptor Hominis stresses the Church’s function as the defender of human rights and human welfare: “… the [C]hurch cannot remain insensible to whatever serves man’s true welfare, any more than she can remain indifferent to what threatens it.”379 In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis John Parul II reinforces the concept of “the mutual

376 _{Church and People on the Move, #17 and #18.}

377 _{5 October, 1995, # 8, printed in L’Osservatore Romano, English edition, (1995), 9.} 378 _Idem.

379

Redemptor Hominis, #13. In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, #33, John Paul II again takes up the same theme, arguing that those “who actively share in the process [of true development need] a lively awareness of the value of the rights of all and each person.”

connectedness of human beings” which gives Christians responsibilities towards others, not just Christians – “of all toward all.”380

From the commencement of their pontificates, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, like their predecessor381, have upheld the importance of the work of the United Nations in defining and upholding human rights. In two different addresses to the General Assembly of the United Nations John Paul II eulogised the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, describing it as “a true milestone on the path of humanity’s moral progress … [and] one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time.”382 He also assured the United Nations of the Holy See’s desire, “consistent with its own identity, … to be a faithful collaborator with the United Nations in all those initiatives which would further this noble and difficult task.”383 Above all, he linked respect for the human rights of each person not only with social justice but also with peace. Thus, he wrote in preparation for the new millennium

a commitment of justice and peace in a world like ours, marked by so many conflicts and intolerable social and economic inequalities, is a necessary condition for the preparation and celebration of the Jubilee.384

380 _{Ibid., #32 and #33. The italics used are from the document. A reading of the U.N.’s Universal} Declaration of Human Rights together with its International Bill of Human Rights, demonstrates the close

connection between them and the Church’s enumeration of human rights as expressed in Pacem in Terris and Gaudium et Spes.

381 _{See quotations from Paul VI in his “Message to the UN on the occasion of the 15}th _{anniversary of the} Universal Declaration on Human Rights”, 1963, #65, cited in Church and People on the Move, #17 and

#18.

382 _{Addresses to the 34}th _{and 50}th _{General Assemblies of the United Nations, 2}nd _{October, 1979 and 11}

October, 1995, 1147-1148 and 8 respectively, cited in the Compendium, #152 and footnote 304.

383

Message to the Secretary General of the United Nations on the XXXth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 2 December, 1978, cited in Filibeck Human Rights, 10.

384 _{Tertio Millenio Adveniente, #51. In this statement John Paul II reiterates his message in Redemptor} Hominis that “peace comes down to respect for man’s inviolable rights … while war springs from the

violation of these rights and brings with it still graver violations of them”, #17. The use of the term “war” by the Pope here I interpret as not just referring to war in the literal sense but also to any form of violence which violates human rights.

Such a statement echoes the 1991 statement of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples which stresses the “need to stand up for human rights, proclaim the demands of justice and denounce injustice not only when [the Church’s] own members are victimized, but independently of the religious allegiance of the victims.”385

In his address to the United Nations in April, 2008 Benedict XVI again emphasizes the relevance of the founding principles on which the United Nations is based to the contemporary world; principles which continue to “express the just aspirations of the human spirit and constitute the ideals which should underpin international relations.” He also argues that “[t]he promotion of human rights remains the most effective strategy for eliminating inequalities between countries and social groups, and for increasing security” but warns that

the common good that human rights help to accomplish cannot … be attained merely by applying correct procedures, nor even less by achieving a balance between competing rights. The merit of the Universal Declaration is that it has enabled different cultures, juridical expressions and institutional models to converge around a fundamental nucleus of values, and hence of rights. Today, though, efforts need to be redoubled in the face of pressure to reinterpret the foundations of the Declaration and to compromise its inner unity so as to facilitate a move away from the protection of human dignity towards the satisfaction of simple interests, often particular interests.

In this regard he reinforces the commitment of the Church to “offer her proper contribution to building international relations in a way that allows every person and every people to feel they can make a difference.”386

385 _{Dialogue and Proclamation, #44, Scherer & Bevans, New Directions in Mission and Evangelization I,}

187.

386

Benedict XVI, Address to the United Nations, New York, 18 April, 2008.