The Catholic Herald

The human rights lawyer who is now the UK Prime Minister made his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 28 May 2015. In it, Keir Starmer praised the Labour government’s enactment of the Human Rights Act (1998), referring back to Magna Carta and noting that “the whole point of human rights is that they apply universally to all people everywhere”. But what exactly are human rights and how ought Catholics to think about them? Because there certainly seems to be a tension between a Catholic conception of natural law and natural rights, and those “rights of man” of the French Declaration of 1789 that Edmund Burke criticised as a “digest of anarchy”. That tension is ever-more apparent in our day where ever-expanding “rights talk” is often used to undermine the very idea of God’s rights and those human rights of which He is the source. One papal reference to human rights can be found at the very beginning of the 20th century.  On 1 November 1900, that greatest of Popes, Leo XIII, told the world: “The world has heard enough of the so-called ‘rights of man’. Let it hear something of the rights of God.” (Tamesti Futura Prospicientibus 13.) Yet earlier in the same encyclical, Pope Leo noted that, as a result of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, man “realised that he was born to much higher and more glorious things than the frail and inconstant objects of sense which had hitherto formed the end of his thoughts and cares. He learnt that the meaning of human life, the supreme law, the end of all things was this: that we come from God and must return to Him. “From this first principle the consciousness of human dignity was revived: men's hearts realised the universal brotherhood: as a consequence, human rights and duties were either perfected or even newly created, whilst on all sides were evoked virtues undreamt of in pagan philosophy.”(TFP 3.) Leo XIII appears to endorse the concept of human rights while also warning of dangers and distortions, in that the invocation of such rights can carry an individualistic and anti-social meaning. Pope Pius XII gave a greater emphasis to the concept in the midst of totalitarianism and the horrors of World War II, during a famous Christmas Message in 1942, stating:  “The cure of this situation becomes feasible when we awaken again the consciousness of a juridical order resting on the supreme dominion of God, and safeguarded from all human whims; a consciousness of an order which stretches forth its arm, in protection or punishment, over the unforgettable rights of man and protects them against the attacks of every human power. “From the juridic order, as willed by God, flows man’s inalienable right to juridical security, and by this very fact to a definite sphere of rights, immune from all arbitrary attack. “The relations of man to man, of the individual to society, to authority, to civil duties; the relations of society and of authority to the individual, should be placed on a firm juridic footing and be guarded, when the need arises, by the authority of the courts.” That emphasis was certainly new. Pius XII saw that a “firm juridic footing” was required so that natural rights would not be mere empty words. However, the concept of a “human right”, if not the name, was adopted by Thomas Aquinas from Roman jurists’ conception of justice as the willingness to render to another person what he has a right to – to render to each “his right” (ius suum). And earlier still, there is evidence that the constitution of Greek States recognised a distinction between fundamental and ordinary laws (think also of Sophocles’ play Antigone). As jurisprudentialist John Finnis has pointed out, the Romans were “implicitly deploying the idea of a right in an authentic and central form”.   Thomas Aquinas holds that there are duties of justice which are owed to every person without distinction (indifferenter) and these are what we call human rights to which humans are entitled simply by virtue of being human. His understanding of these “natural rights” is part of his general understanding that there is a “natural law”, which is man’s way of participating in the eternal law of God – the rational plan by which God orders all of creation. In other words, the person is understood as a free and spiritual being directed at spiritual ends and subject to the moral constrains of an eternal order. He is not merely directed at his own “emancipation” or “autonomy”. RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/hyper-sexualisation-transformation-and-evangelisation-just-your-average-summer-of-sport/?swcfpc=1">Hyper-sexualisation, ‘trans’-formation and evangelisation: just your average summer of ideological sport</a> Those declarations of the rights of man which speak of human dignity and freedom but neglect the metaphysical substructure, which gives content to these terms, carry with them an inherent instability. Without that substructure, the danger is that rights talk degenerates into whatever people decide their “needs” are; for example, their “need” to choose their own death or their sexual- or identity-related “needs”. But to then mistake the distortion of human rights with the concept itself is also a trap which some conservatives seem keen to fall into. Pope Leo XIII did not make that mistake. Nor, interestingly, did that aforementioned critic of the “rights of man”, Edmund Burke. He did indeed see the French Declaration of 1789 as a “digest of anarchy”, and noted that “if civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right”. However, Burke was also to speak of the “real rights of man”, and in his speech on the American rebellion – given before his attacks on the French Declaration – he stated that such rights are “indeed sacred things, and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure even if no charter at all could be set against it”. Strikingly, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has a Hebrew name that means “in the image” when translated into English – an allusion to Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him.” Blaise Pascal once wrote: “The highest good is in us; and it is not we ourselves”. That highest good is, of course, God. If we seek to emancipate ourselves from that Highest Good and put in place of the Divine image a merely human image of man, we begin to lose our very humanity. And to lose it in the name of “human rights” is to succumb to that prideful worship of man which is the chief characteristic of our age. When we hear human rights lawyers seeking to expand what count as rights without ever stopping to consider what might be the rights of God that make sense of the rights of man, we need to be aware that, ultimately, it is man himself that they denigrate. The philosopher Aurel Kolnai urged that man will rediscover his humanity when he “truly and integrally reasserts the greatest and most vital of his needs, ignored and maimed and stifled by humanitarianism: the need for a meaning of his life which points decisively and majestically beyond the range of his ‘needs’." RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/what-has-happened-to-british-justice-and-will-our-church-speak-out-or-continue-its-descent-into-two-tier-catholicism/?swcfpc=1">What has happened to British justice and will our Church speak out or continue its descent into two-tier Catholicism?</a> Photo: Sir Keir Starmer, along with Angela Rayner – now UK Deputy Prime Minister in Starmer's Labour government – attends London's Pride parade, London, England, 2 July 2022. (Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images.)

Modern ‘human rights’ hype risks sacrificing not only God but our very humanity

Anthony McCarthy

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