THE SOURCES OF 'RIGHTS TALK': The UDHR & its surprising Catholic pedigree
GLENDON, MARY ANN
THE SOURCES OF 'RIGHTS TALK' Some are Catholic Nary Ann Glendon On December 10,1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). There were no...
...So unesco asked a group of philosophers—some well known in the West, like Jacques Maritain, and others from Confucian, Hindu, and Muslim countries—to examine the question...
...The Declaration quickly became the principal inspiration of the postwar international human-rights movement...
...Needless to say, the church's adoption of rights language entailed the need to be very clear about the fact that she does not always use that terminology in the same way it is used in secular circles...
...But what I discovered about the history of the Declaration in doing research for my book, A World Made New, should be of particular interest to Catholics as well as to all those concerned about protecting human rights...
...In this context, some of the most striking interactions between Catholic social thought and human rights have occurred in the field of international advocacy...
...First, Commonweal 12 October 12,2001 the rights tradition into which the church has tapped is the biblically informed, continental, dignitarian tradition which she herself had already done so much to shape...
...But I believe it was more than that...
...In Vatican II's Gaudium et spes, the council fathers say that the movement to respect human rights "must be imbued with the spirit of the gospel and be protected from all appearance of mistaken autonomy...
...It also seems clear that he must have agreed with Maritain and other Catholic thinkers that there was value in discussing certain human goods as rights, even though the biblical tradition uses the language of obligation...
...Those living in poverty can wait no longer: They need help now and so have a right to receive immediately what they need [emphasis supplied...
...Several features of the Declaration set it apart from both Anglo-American and Soviet-bloc documents, and these should be kept in mind as contests over the meanings of the Declaration's provisions continue...
...But the church's use of rights language in this context cannot be equated with crude mandates for state-run social engineering programs...
...The framers of the UDHR had similar expectations for the relatively short list of rights that they deemed fundamental...
...I would say it was also part of the church's shift from nature to history, as well as her increasing openness to learning from other traditions...
...Let me begin with a little background...
...Roncalli's subsequent actions suggest that events in the UN that fall must have made a great impression on him...
...Those who think the church should never have gone down that road at all often fail to notice two important facts about the church's use of rights language...
...the worker's right to just remuneration for himself and his family...
...It begins, I believe, in Paris in 1948 when the Human Rights Commissioners were trying to round up support from as many nations as possible for the final vote on the Declaration...
...Hannah Arendt has warned, "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction...
...Habib Malik, I asked him if he knew where his father had acquired that vocabulary...
...Contrary to what is now widely supposed, the most zealous promoters of social and economic rights were not the Soviet bloc representatives but delegates from the Latin American countries...
...But where did the Latin Americans and continental Europeans get them...
...We are tempted to consider our personal rights as fully protected only when we are free from every norm of divine law...
...There were no dissenting votes, although the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa recorded abstentions...
...As for the future, I believe the dialogue between Catholicism and the human-rights tradition will continue, and that it will be beneficial to both...
...I trust that my enthusiasm for Catholic social thought and philosophy as seen in the light of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will not be understood as unbridled boosterism...
...It is one thing to acknowledge that the human mind can glimpse truth only as through a glass darkly...
...These philosophers sent a questionnaire to still more leading thinkers, from Mahatma Gandhi to Teilhard de Chardin, and in due course, they reported that, somewhat to their surprise, they had found that there were a few common standards of decency that were widely shared, though not always formulated in the language of rights...
...While most nations take a selective approach to human rights, the Holy See consistently lifts up the original vision of the Declaration—a vision in which political and civil rights are indispensable for social and economic justice, and vice versa...
...and a provision that motherhood and childhood are entitled to "special care and assistance...
...Where did those ideas come from...
...But that assignment rested upon a couple of problematic assumptions: no one really knew whether there were any such common principles, or what they might be...
...It also differed from socialist charters, notably with its strong emphasis on political and civil liberties...
...The answer was: from the heavily underlined copies of Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno, which Malik kept among the books he most frequently consulted...
...member nations of the UN when it was founded in 1945...
...Moreover, the church teaches solidarity not as a policy, but as a virtue—a virtue that inclines us to overcome sources of division within ourselves and within society...
...Considering some of the ways in which the Catholic influence was reciprocated is harder to follow...
...With more than 300,000 educational, health-care, and relief agencies serving mainly the world's poorest inhabitants, the church has become an outspoken advocate of social justice in international settings...
...it is inseparable from personal reform...
...It was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt who was just then making a new life for herself after the death of her husband...
...It is the dynamic, recurrent, and potentially self-correcting process of experiencing, understanding, and judging that has animated her best theologians from Thomas Aquinas to Bernard Lonergan...
...They drew many provisions from existing constitutions and rights instruments...
...The long Catholic experience in the dialectic between the core teachings of the faith and the various cultural settings in which the faith has been received helps us to see that to accept universal principles does not mean accepting that they must be brought to life in the same way everywhere...
...There is an intriguing sentence in Cassin's memoirs where he says that in the fall of 1948 he was aided on several occasions by the "discreet personal encouragements" of the papal nuncio in Paris...
...But in practical terms, the most consequential support came from several Latin American countries, which composed twenty-one of the original fifty-five Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University...
...in the life experience and in the culture of individuals and nations...
...Another came from the British writer H.G...
...This group, too, was highly diverse, but they had few disagreements over the content of the Declaration...
...the prior right of parents to choose the education of their children...
...Her most recent book is A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Random House...
...He had lost twenty-nine relatives in concentration camps, and was later to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his human-rights activities...
...and it serves today as the single most important reference point for discussions of human rights in international settings...
...Many Catholics were surprised, and some were even shocked, at the extent to which the documents of Vatican II, and John XXIII's encyclicals Pacem in terris and Mater et magistra (1961), seemed to reflect a shift from natural law to human rights...
...Largely due to the insistence of the Latin Americans, joined by other small nations, the UN established a Human Rights Commission composed of members from eighteen different countries...
...I am well aware that much of what our tradition has to offer was learned painfully after mistakes and sad experience...
...As Jacques Maritain put it, there can be many different kinds of music played on the Declaration's thirty strings...
...The judgment of the philosophers was borne out by the experience of the delegates on the Human Rights Commission...
...But when it comes to the creation and continuing relevance of the Declaration, the church has reason to be proud of its contribution...
...The short answer is that those encyclicals were part of the process through which the church had begun to reflect on the Enlightenment, the eighteenthcentury revolutions, socialism, and the labor question in the light of Scripture, tradition, and her own experience as an "expert in humanity...
...The answer is: mainly from the social encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931...
...Another dilemma for the human-rights project is the challenge of historicism and relativism...
...and the distinction between true and false...
...And where did the politicians get their ideas about the family, work, civil society, and the dignity of the person...
...The most articulate advocate of this complex of ideas on the Human Rights Commission was a Lebanese Arab of the Greek Orthodox faith, Charles Malik...
...Their conclusion was that this practical consensus was enough to enable the project to go forward...
...One may even imagine that the resources of the Catholic tradition may be helpful in resolving several thorny dilemmas that have bedeviled the human-rights project from its outset, especially the dilemmas arising from challenges to its universality and its truth claims...
...Catholic social teaching, however, was just one of many sources of influence on that impressively multicultural document...
...the recognition of the family as the "natural and fundamental group unit of society" entitled as such to "protection by society and the state...
...Commonweal 13 October 12,2001...
...A key figure in that lobbying process was the French member of the Commission, Rene Cassin...
...The final draft was a synthesis drawn from many sources— and thus a document that differed in many ways from our familiar Anglo-American rights instruments—most noticeably in its inclusion of social and economic rights, and in its express acknowledgment that rights are subject to duties and limitations...
...They relied most heavily on two draft proposals for international bills that were themselves based on extensive crossnational research...
...If you are like most Americans, and like me before I got interested in the Declaration, you probably do not stay up nights thinking about the United Nations and its various pronouncements...
...And where did the church get them...
...the affirmation that the human person is "endowed with reason and conscience...
...In Pacem in terris (1963), John XXIII referred to the Universal Declaration by name and called it "an act of the highest importance...
...the model for the majority of rights instruments in the world—over ninety in all...
...no longer exist...
...The Catholic doctrine of human rights," Avery Dulles points out, "is not based on Lockean empiricism or individualism...
...For one thing, the church has always refrained from proposing specific models: her gift to political science has been, rather, the principle of subsidiarity—which is steadily attracting interest as the United States debates the pros and cons of delivering many social services through faith-based institutions...
...Some writers regard this shift as mainly rhetorical, an effort on the part of the church to make her teachings intelligible to "all men and women of good will...
...When I had the opportunity to meet Charles Malik's son, Dr...
...Their writings reveal that they contemplated a legitimate pluralism in forms of freedom, a variety of means of protecting basic rights, and different ways of resolving the tensions among rights, provided that no rights were completely subordinated to others...
...In reading the old UN transcripts, I was struck by Malik's frequent use of terms like the "intermediate associations" of civil society, and by his emphatic preference for the term "person" rather than "individual...
...Their focus was not on the exploitation of man by man, but on the dignity of work and the preferential option for the poor...
...The immediate source was the twentieth-century constitutions of many Latin American and continental European countries...
...The church's advocacy of the preferential option for the poor has led her to become a staunch defender of the Universal Declaration as an integrated whole...
...Except for the Mexican delegates, most of these people were inspired, not by Marx and Engels, but, like Malik, by Leo XIII and Pius XI...
...During World War II, the idea began to percolate that there should be some kind of international bill of rights—a common standard to which all nations could aspire—and by which they could measure their own and each other's progress...
...When the Human Rights Commission set to work in early 1947, its first major task was to draft a "bill of rights" to which persons of all nations and cultures could subscribe...
...One of these proposals was prepared under Commonweal 11 October 12,2001 the auspices of the American Law Institute, and the other was a Latin American document that became the 1948 Bogota Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man...
...the right to form trade unions...
...The experience of Catholicism with the inculturation of its basic teachings shows that universality need not entail homogeneity...
...Like any other virtue, solidarity requires constant practice...
...The proximate answer to that question is: mainly from the programs of political parties, parties of a type that did not exist in the United States, Britain, or the Soviet bloc, namely, Christian Democratic and Christian Social parties...
...Cassin was a distinguished French lawyer who described himself as a secular Jew...
...Their disputes were chiefly political, and mainly involved the Soviet Union and the United States hurling accusations of hypocrisy against each other...
...The framers of the UDHR, like legal drafters everywhere, had done a good deal of copying...
...but following this road leads to the destruction rather than to the maintenance of the dignity of the human person...
...This article is adapted from this year's Marianist Award lecture given at the University of Dayton...
...The Reason that the church defends is not the calculating reason of Hobbes—in the service of the passions—nor is it narrow scientific rationalism...
...Challenging passages like this one from John Paul II's 1997 World Day of Peace message do not sit particularly well with affluent nations and firstworld interest groups: Living out [the] demanding commitment [to solidarity] requires a total reversal of the alleged values which make people seek only their own good: power, pleasure, the unscrupulous accumulation of wealth...A society of genuine solidarity can be built only if the welloff, in helping the poor, do not stop at giving from what they do not need...
...The church has always taught, with Saint Paul, that our knowledge of truth in this life is imperfect...
...One of the first suggestions came from Pope Pius XII, who, in a June 1941 radio address, called for an international bill recognizing the rights that flowed from the dignity of the person...
...and quite another to deny the existence of truth altogether...
...Wells in a little pamphlet subtitled, "What Are We Fighting For...
...If there are no common truths to which all men and women can appeal, then there are no human rights, and there is little hope that reason and choice can prevail over force and accident in the realm of human affairs...
...In the same vein, John XXIII noted in Pacem in terris that everything the church says about human rights is conditioned by their foundation in the dignity that attaches to the person made in the image and likeness of God, and everything is oriented to the end of the common good...
...Second, the church did not even uncritically adopt the dignitarian vision...
...Consider the following: its pervasive emphasis on the "inherent dignity" and "worth of the human person...
...But she has not always been so forceful as John Paul II was in Centesimus annus (1991) when he insisted that Christian believers are obliged to remain open to discover "every fragment of truth...
...At first glance, words like "a right to receive what one needs" sound uncomfortably like simplistic, secular social advocacy...
...It has a more ancient and distinguished pedigree...
...That nuncio was none other than Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII...
...But it is a hard sell...
Vol. 128 • October 2001 • No. 17
