All in the family

AP Photo

To begin, see the post below. Those were the opening remarks, in French, of Pope Benedict before the United Nations this week. He said plenty, and plenty more than the media are picking up in their stories about points on environmentalism and human rights.

When the Holy Father began the bulk of his address in English, he was only warming up to his challenge to protect the human family by promoting the sanctity of all life and the rights of every person, not relative to redefinition by a group in power or by consensus.

The common good that human rights help to accomplish cannot, however, 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.  The Declaration was adopted as a “common standard of achievement” (Preamble) and cannot be applied piecemeal, according to trends or selective choices that merely run the risk of contradicting the unity of the human person and thus the indivisibility of human rights.

The address can get bulky, unless you parse it down. I did that all week with all his addresses (and President Bush’s) in coverage broadcast on Relevant Radio. Here’s the fruit of that labor, because the UN address is loaded with gentle “skewers”, as one priest put it. Like this one, in the very next sentence:

Experience shows that legality often prevails over justice when the insistence upon rights makes them appear as the exclusive result of legislative enactments or normative decisions taken by the various agencies of those in power.

That sounds bulky to the ear. But here’s what it means: just because something is legal doesn’t make it moral. Like the language of “reproductive rights”, for instance, that some non-governmental groups at the UN have tried to write into the UN’s documents in order to export contraception and abortion globally and tie it to international aid. Or, say, the right to end one’s life in the attempt to spread euthanasia disguised as compassion.

But the Holy Father doesn’t use those exact words. His are more nuanced, and elegant.

When presented purely in terms of legality, rights risk becoming weak propositions divorced from the ethical and rational dimension which is their foundation and their goal. The Universal Declaration, rather, has reinforced the conviction that respect for human rights is principally rooted in unchanging justice… This aspect is often overlooked when the attempt is made to deprive rights of their true function in the name of a narrowly utilitarian perspective.

And here he brings in one of his messages of the week, the fundamental lesson of the Golden Rule:

This intuition was expressed as early as the fifth century by Augustine of Hippo, one of the masters of our intellectual heritage.  He taught that the saying:  Do not do to others what you would not want done to you “cannot in any way vary according to the different understandings that have arisen in the world” (De Doctrina Christiana, III, 14).  Human rights, then, must be respected as an expression of justice, and not merely because they are enforceable through the will of the legislators.

So…might does not make right, to boil it down to basics.

Here, Benedict pivots and turns to religious freedom, the fundamental base of all human rights, as he has repeatedly said throughout the three years of his pontificate.

Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom…The activity of the United Nations in recent years has ensured that public debate gives space to viewpoints inspired by a religious vision in all its dimensions, including ritual, worship, education, dissemination of information and the freedom to profess and choose religion.  It is inconceivable, then, that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves – their faith – in order to be active citizens.  It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights.

He wouldn’t be saying this if it weren’t the case in some nations, even in very advanced western nations.

The rights associated with religion are all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an exclusive nature.  The full guarantee of religious liberty cannot be limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the possibility of believers playing their part in building the social order.  Indeed, they actually do so, for example through their influential and generous involvement in a vast network of initiatives which extend from Universities, scientific institutions and schools to health care agencies and charitable organizations in the service of the poorest and most marginalized.

(That’s the principle of subsidiarity, a tenet of Catholic social teaching.)

The United Nations remains a privileged setting in which the Church is committed to contributing her experience “of humanity”, developed over the centuries among peoples of every race and culture, and placing it at the disposal of all members of the international community.  This experience and activity, directed towards attaining freedom for every believer, seeks also to increase the protection given to the rights of the person.  Those rights are grounded and shaped by the transcendent nature of the person, which permits men and women to pursue their journey of faith and their search for God in this world.  Recognition of this dimension must be strengthened if we are to sustain humanity’s hope for a better world and if we are to create the conditions for peace, development, cooperation, and guarantee of rights for future generations.

In 1995, Pope John Paul II addressed the United Nations on the fiftieth anniversary of its founding. In it, remarked about what the changes of the times meant “for the future of the whole human family.” Here’s one key remark:

If we want a century of violent coercion to be succeeded by a century of persuasion, we must find a way to discuss the human future intelligibly. The universal moral law written on the human heart is precisely that kind of “grammar” which is needed if the world is to engage this discussion of its future.

This week, Pope Benedict continued that discussion by re-introducing moral grammar to the United Nations, and called them back to their original intent. It is critical that they understand the language.