Claims in Conflict
Dohen, Dorothy
Claims in Conflict: Retrieving and Renewing the Catholic Human Rights Tradition, by David Hollenbach, Paulist Press, $5.95, 219 pp. This book attempts two major tasks: to trace the...
...However, liberation theologians are chary of using the terminology of human rights at all, so closely for them is it still connected with capitalistic individualism...
...In modern, pluralistic societies claims will have to be resolved through conflict, which does not necessarily need to be destructive of a larger and deeper social unity...
...So greatly do I appreciate Hollenbach's work that I look forward to a sequel in which he will incorporate the thinking of Pope John Paul II...
...For Leo XIII and Pius XI competing claims over human rights were to be resolved using a model of stable, hierarchical society...
...For people in the western democracies, the term connotes personal civil rights...
...This book attempts two major tasks: to trace the development of papal teaching on human rights from Leo XIII through Paul VI, and to suggest some principles which could be used as the basis for ranking human rights...
...For us in western democracies, then, the major task may be to raise our consciousness that human rights are preeminently social, referring as they do to the person in community...
...The right to food is a basic human right and so is the right to free speech...
...Yet, citing cogently examples from Latin American countries, he indicates that regimes which are repressive in regard to civil rights consistently suppress the economic rights of the masses of their people as well...
...Yet for the popes, as well as in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the term is all-inclusive...
...Hollenbach observes that the stress on different sets of human rights has given the unfortunate impression that peoples and governments can choose between them...
...DOROTHY DOHEN Commonweal: 158...
...Hollenbach suggests that competing claims be resolved by giving priority to the needs of the poor, the powerless, and the other groups which are marginal to society...
...For the church, Hollenbach sees the most important task today as developing a theory of social conflict...
...Perhaps he could include as well more material from sociology and political science on the functions of social conflict and on mechanisms for mediating conflicting claims...
...Which human rights are more important than others...
...for the members of the Communist bloc, economic and social rights are meant...
...Hollenbach notes that even the term "human rights" is ambiguous...
...What policies should be developed within a society and internationally to make this principle effective is an issue beyond the scope of this book...
...But such a society no longer exists...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 5
