Human Rights are Given Not Taken

THE CHURCH HAS ADOPTED INTO HER TEACHING the modern notion of human rights with some modifications. Understood correctly through incorporation into human nature and natural law, a concept of human rights can be reconciled quite felicitously with the traditional social doctrine of the Church. Unfortunately, the concept of human rights is often misunderstood by its most vociferous advocates, and so we have such anomalies and absurdities such as the view that men have a right to define marriage as they see fit, that women have a right to an abortion, that men have a right to take their own life it it seems to them (or to others) too burdensome.

In the Church's view, human rights are not something that man creates out of whole cloth, on mere subjective whim, by social contract. Man is not the measure of human rights. God is the measure of human rights. In the eyes of the Church, human rights are based upon an objective moral order. Most fundamentally, human rights are built upon human dignity, which, as we may recall, comes from the fact that man is made in the image and likeness of God and is called to communion with God. The "roots of human rights," the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church observes, "are to be found in the dignity that belongs to each human being." (Compendium, No. 152)

Among the incessant, frequently irresponsible and cacophonous "rights talk," how do we distinguish true and authentic human rights from their counterfeit? The Church directs us to two sources: reason and nature, on the one hand, and Revelation, on the other. "The natural foundation of rights appears all the more solid when, in the light of the supernatural, it is considered that human dignity, after having been given by God and having been profoundly wounded by sin, was taken on and redeemed by Jesus Christ in his incarnation, death, and resurrection." (Compendium, No. 153)

The fundamental source of human rights is thus human nature, which is to say, that nature as created by God. God, then, may be said to be the ultimate guarantor as he is the ultimate foundation of human rights. Human rights are therefore different from civil rights, the latter being based upon the positive laws of the State. What the State gives, the State may give away. But human rights are not given and taken.


Human rights are simply given by God. They are not to be taken by the State or by any human being without giving offense to God. "The ultimate source of human rights is not found in the mere will of human being, in the reality of the State, in public powers, but in man himself and in God his Creator." (Compendium, No. 153)

Since human rights are given by God, they enjoy a four-part quality. They are universal. They are inviolable. They are inalienable. They are indivisible.

Human rights are universal. Inasmuch as they are founded upon human nature, they are "present in all human beings, without exception of time, place, or subject." (Compendium, No. 153) These rights, like the natural law upon which they are ultimate based, apply equally to all humans irrespective of condition.

Not only are human rights universal, they are also inviolable. They are inviolable because "they are inherent in the human person and in human dignity." Other humans and human institutions, therefore, have an obligation to recognize the inviolability of human rights.

Finally, human rights are inalienable. "No one," the Compendium states quoting John Paul II, "can legitimately deprive another person, whoever they may be, of these rights, since this would do violence to their nature." (Compendium, No. 153)

The universal, inviolable, and inalienable quality of human rights means that they must be defended "not only individually, but also as a whole." They are therefore indivisible. They are a sort of total package, encompass man in his integrity, covering both body and soul, both "material and spiritual spheres," from the first beginning of his life to his natural death.

The indivisibility of human rights means that we are not entitled to select some human rights and ignore others or promote one to the expense of another. "The integral promotion of every category of human rights is the true guarantee of full respect for each individual right." Moreover, the indivisibility of human rights requires that they be recognized to "apply to every stage of life and to every political, social, economic, and cultural situation." (Compendium, No. 67)

In terms of identifying the more important of these human rights, the Compendium draws from John Paul II's social encyclical Centesimus Annus:

• "the right to life, an integral part of which is the right of the child to develop in the other's womb from the moment of conception"
• "the right to live in a united family and in a moral environment conducive to the growth of the child's personality"
• "the right to develop one's intelligence and freedom in seeking and knowing the truth"
• "the right to share in the work which makes wise use of the earth's material resources, and to derive from that work the means to support oneself and one's dependents"
• "the right freely to establish a family, to have and to rear children through the responsible exercise of one's sexuality"
• the right of religious freedom, "understood as the right to live in the truth of one's faith and in conformity with one's transcendent dignity as a person."
  

(Compendium, No. 155)

Particularly in the dissolute West, we speak often of "rights," but rarely of "duties." And yet for the Church, rights and duties are correlative principles. Rights and duties are "inextricably connected." The are mutually complementary. They are "indissolubly linked." (Compendium, No. 156) For every right there is a corresponding duty. Human rights are like coins, they have an opposite face which shows a duty.

To speak only of rights while disregarding duties is irresponsible. They are, using Pope John XXIII's image from his encyclical Pacem in terris, akin to someone who builds with one hand and destroys with the other. "The Magisterium underlines the contradiction inherent in affirming rights without acknowledging corresponding responsibilities." (Compendium, No. 156) The Church's notion of human rights is clearly different from that notion espoused by modern liberalism or moral relativism, which tend to think only of rights, and never of duties.

Human rights apply to individual persons, but they also apply to human communities, including peoples and nations. They are therefore important governors of relations between peoples and nations. International law must recognize human rights. Indeed, the "rights of nations are nothing but 'human rights fostered at the specific level of community life."' (Compendium, No. 157)

There is a sort of irony in the modern preoccupation with human rights in that there is a huge credibility gap between word and deed, between the lip service given to rights and the "painful reality of violations, wars and violence of every kind, in the first place, genocides and mass deportations, the spreading on a virtual worldwide dimension of every new forms of slavery such as trafficking in human beings, child soldiers, the exploitation of workers, illegal drug trafficking, prostitution." (Compendium, No. 158)

With respect to human rights, we are like the Pharisees of old of whom Jesus observed: "for they say, and do not do." (Matt. 23:2) The Compendium calls this a "gap between the 'letter' and the 'spirit' of human rights."

We must therefore work towards closing this gap and assuring a greater correlation between word and deed, letter and spirit. But there is more.

We are called to perform acts of supererogation or sacrifice when it comes to rights: "The Church's social doctrine, in consideration off the privilege accorded by the Gospel to the poor, repeats over and over that the 'the more fortunate should renounce some of their rights so as to place their goods more generously at the service of others." (Compendium, No. 159) We must remember Christ's words: "as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me." (Matt. 25:45)

The Compendium also recognizes that an excessive affirmation of equality "can give rise to an individualism in which each one claims his own rights without wishing to be answerable for the common good." (Compendium, No. 158) There ought to be less self-regarding "mine, mine, mine," and more other-regarding "yours, yours, yours."

Properly understood, human rights are part of the evangelical message. They are founded upon the human nature created by God and represent a recognition of that order of things found in God's plan for man and his world.

Just like someone who knowingly and intentionally violates the natural law--unless he repents--cannot be saved,* so someone who knowingly and intentionally violates the fundamental human rights of another person--unless he repents--cannot be saved. "If a man say, I love God, yet he hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen." (1 John 4:20)

How, then, can human rights be anything else than part of the message of the Gospel? The Church sees the promotion of human rights as part of her evangelical duties. "This pastoral commitment develops in a twofold direction: in the proclamation of the Christian foundations of human rights and in the denunciation of the violations of these rights." (Compendium, No. 159)

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*See Compliance with the Natural Law Essential For Salvation which discusses Cardinal Archbishop Raymond Burke's speech at Human Life International's Prayer Congress for Life, October 9, 2010. ("Obedience to the demands of the natural law is necessary for salvation, and, therefore, the teaching of the natural law is within the authority of the Magisterium and part of its solemn responsibility.")

Natural Law's Modern Cousin Germain: Specifying Rights

TO MAKE THE MOVE FROM a general concept to a specific conception of right, say, from the "right to life" to the "right to life from the first moment of conception until natural death," is sometimes a very controversial and complex subject. All of a sudden consensus as to concept falls apart when the concept is specified, concretized, particularized, or qualified into specific conception. In Finnis's view, general concept of rights have to be specified into conceptions, and this must be done by changing the rights from two-term rights ("I have a right to X" to three-term rights using the Hohfeldian analysis that Finnis adopted and which we discussed in an earlier posting* ("A has a right to X, which B has a commensurate duty"). The number of factors that must be thought through in specifying rights, in the determination of concept to conception, can be daunting:

1. One must identify the duty holder(s) who must respect or give effect to A's rights;
2. One must define the content of the duty--what specific acts, times, circumstances, conditions, apply to that duty.
3. One must identify the correlative scope of A's claim-right.
4. One must identify the conditions under which A may waive or lose his claim-right or waive any other persons duties that correlate to A's right.
5. One must identify A's remedies in the event there is non-performance of the duty and A's rights thereby infringed.
6. The liberties relating to A's claim rights, and any limits on those liberties, particular those that may involve the duty of non-infringement of others' liberties, which means a specification of duties upon A with regard to the claim-rights of others (e.g., B).
   

The moment B is brought it, it requires a similar analysis (1-6 above), which brings us to C (for which the same analysis, 1-6 must be made), which brings us to D . . .

Going from Concept of Right to Conception of Rights is Daunting
The Natural Law Must Guide

This is what happens to a rights analysis that is placed within a communal framework. It is no wonder, then that people who share the same concept of right (the right to life, or the right to free speech, or the right to trial by jury) have a difficult time when it comes to specific determination of that right, what Finnis calls conceptions of that right. The whole calculative complexity of the specification steps outlined above causes unanimity in concept to result in disagreement in conception.

The only way to order the specification of rights with any hope at consensus is to have some sort of overriding guiding principles:

There is, I think, no alternative but tho hold in one's mind's eye some pattern, or range of patterns, of human character, conduct, and interaction in community, and then chose such specification of rights as tends to favour that patter, or range of patterns. In other words, one needs some conception of human good, of individual flourishing in a form (or range of forms) of communal life that fosters rather than hinders such flourishing.

NLNR, 219-20. Such a matrix, Finnis observes, will distinguish art from trash, culture from ignorance, friendship and respect from hatred, group bias, and "anarchic sexuality." It will recognize that children need to be formed, but will reject "servility, infantilism, and hypocrisy," and so forth. NLNR, 220. It will, in fact, add some sort of objectivity to the process of moving from concept to conception. Without some sort of overarching matrix, the work and public discussion in moving from concept to conception can not only be fruitless, it can be positively harmful to the common good and lead to endless bickering, infighting, and ill-will. Ultimately, the concept of rights must be nestled within the framework of natural law:

Human rights (not to mention the public order and morality which constitute a necessary framework for their enjoyment) can certainly be threatened by uses of rights-talk which, in bad faith or good, prematurely ascribe a conclusory or absolute status to this or that human right (e.g., property, contract, assembly, speech). however, if its logic and and its place in practice reasonableness about human flourishing are kept in mind, the modern usage of claims of right as the principal counter in political discourse should be recognized (despite its dubious seventeenth century origins and its abuse by fanatics, adventurers, and self-interested persons from the eighteenth century until today) as a valuable addition to the received vocabulary of practical reasonableness (i.e., to the tradition of 'natural law doctrine').

NLNR, 221. It is like rights are a wild steed, and they must be reined-in and broken in by a steady hand, the steady hand of the natural moral law.

For all their problems, their "dubious . . . origins," their "abuse by fanatics, adventurers, and self-interested persons," for all their potential for capture and appropriation by opportunists, rights have some valuable contributions to make in public discourse as they have some intrinsic features which makes them particularly effective in certain areas. Finnis identifies three such traits:

1. Rights emphasize equality, which is "the truth that every human being is a locus of human flourishing which is to be considered with favour in him as much as anybody else." This keeps "justice in the foreground of our considerations."
2. Rights-talk tends to dissipate or counter the tendency towards utilitarian or consequentialist "calculation" since rights are frequently touted as absolute. And any absolute right queers a utilitarian's work, throws a wrench in the consequentialist machine.
3. Since rights must be specified, they serve as useful vehicles for identifying and amplifying "a usefully detailed listing of the various aspects of human flourishing and fundamental components of the way of life in community that tends to favour such flourishing for all." NLNR, 221.
   

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*See Natural Law's Modern Cousin Germain: Rights Talk.

Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Historical Excursus on Human Rights

HUMAN RIGHTS HAVE A FOUNDATION, a foundation that their most rabid advocates, or perhaps better, those ideologues who have captured the concept of human rights so as to exploit it, seem to want to hide, forget, or suppress. The ideologues--advocates of abortion rights, homosexual rights, to name but two of such groups--want to take the notion of human rights, put a chain around its neck, and treat it as a beast of burden, goading it to do things it has no business doing, parading it around in a cage, like Tamerlane did to the captured Sultan Bajazet. But to a philosopher such as Jacques Maritain, the philosophical or rational foundation of human rights is of great interest. It is of great interest because it is what explains the importance, even immutability of human rights. At the same time, it delineates their limits. Were the foundations of human rights properly understood, the liberals, the libertines, the radical progressives, the positivists would find themselves without warrant to be spouting their "rights talk." Why? Because, "[t]he philosophical foundation of the Rights of man is Natural Law." Maritain, 53. Not, however, the "natural law" of the Jacobins and French philosophes or of Kant and Hegel, but the "natural law" of Cicero, of St. Paul, of St. Augustine, and of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Like the term "human rights," the term "natural law" was captured and misused by ideologues, ideologues of both conservative and revolutionary leanings, so much so that Maritain exclaims in frustration: "Sorry that we cannot find another word!" Maritain, 53. But we ought not to yield the word, just like we ought not to yield on the word Madonna because of its capture and exploitation by the aging, yet ever-confused, Madonna Louise Ciccone.* We ought to recapture it from those who seek to appropriate it, and learn what it is and what it is not. We must learn to distinguish between the doctrine and theories of the natural law--some of which are truer than others, and some of which may be plain false--and the natural law itself which is immutable.

As we discussed in earlier postings on Maritain, there was a change in the concept of natural law beginning in the 17th century, though it had earlier roots, wherein God and the eternal law were separated from the natural law, except perhaps being a sort of distant, Deistic guarantor of last resort. The natural law, thus, appeared shorn from its moorings, the nature of man and his reason, bobbed up and down on the waves to look fallible, fickle indeed. Ironically, the notion of nature and of human reason became to be thought of as "Nature with a capital N and Reason with a capital R," as if they were "abstract divinities sitting in a Platonic heaven." Maritain, 55. The result of putting Nature and Reason in an independent, idealistic throne, in raising them to the Pantheon as if they were gods, was an unrealistic, untenable, doctrine:

As a result the consonance of a human act with reason was to mean that that act was traced from a ready-made, pre-existing pattern which infallible Reason had instructed to lay down by infallible Nature, and which, consequently, should be immutably and universally recognized in all placed of the earth and at all moments of time.

Maritain, 55. Worse, these wannabe Euclids of morality believed that moral calculation could be done with mathematical or geometric precision. Calculating morality was no different that calculating the circumference of a circle given its radius. Read the fantasies of Condorcet in his Observations de Condorcet sur le vingt-neuvième livre de l'Esprit de Lois:

Since truth, reason, justice, the rights of men, and the interests of property, liberty, and security are the same everywhere, it is difficult to understand why all provinces of a state, and for that matter all states, should not have the same criminal laws, the same civil laws, the same laws regulating trade, etc. A good law must be good for all men, in the same way that a true proposition is correct for everybody.

Comme la vérité, la raison, la justice, les droits des hommes, l’intérêt de la propriété, de la liberté, de la sûreté, sont les mêmes partout, on ne voit pas pourquoi toutes les provinces d’un État, ou même tous les États, n’auraient pas les mêmes lois criminelles, les mêmes lois civiles, les mêmes lois de commerce, etc. Une bonne loi doit être bonne pour tous, comme une proposition vraie est vraie pour tous.

Cf. Maritain, 55 (who quotes Condorcet partially without reference). It is quite apparent that Condorcet forgot the fundamental Aristotelian principle so trenchantly express by William Blake in his "Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression". It is inconceivable, and an untenable principle, that law should be the same "for man of the age of cave-dwellers as well as for man of the age of the steam engine, for nomadic tribes as well as for agricultural peoples." Maritain, 55. This sort of Procrustean view of law is, in a word, stupid.

What was the "fatal mistake" of these thinkers in Maritain's view?

Natural law--which is within the being of things as their very essence is, and which precedes all formulation, and is even known to human reason not in terms of conceptual and rational knowledge . . . [was improperly] conceived after the pattern of a written code, applicable to all, of which any just law should be a transcription, and which would determine a priori and in all its aspects the norms of human behaviour through ordinances supposedly prescribed by Nature and Reason, but in reality arbitrarily and artificially formulated.

Maritain, 56.

It was this "fatal mistake" that caused this absurd doctrine as espoused by Condorcet and his ilk, and caused every man's reason and every man's nature to be promulgated as law. Thus:

As Warnkoenig has shown, eight or more new systems of natural law made their appearance at every Leipzig booksellers' fair since 1780. Thus Jean Paul Richter's ironical remark contained no exaggeration: Every fair and every war brings forth a new natural law.

Maritain, 56 (quoting Heinrich A. Rommen's The Natural Law).

These doctrines of natural law--and, like the Gerasenes demon, their name is legion--so attacked by positivists are but straw men. No wonder they burned up in a conflagration once the flames of Hume's skepticism and Austin's positivism touched them.

But the problem got even worse. Instead of re-attaching this emancipated-and-then-divinized human reason and human nature to their eternal source to remedy the problem wrought by the thinkers of the earlier century, thinkers such as Leibniz and Kant tried to solve the problem by emancipating and then divinizing the human will. Typical of liberal thinking: to liberalize still further as a solution to the problems that their initial liberalization caused. "So that finally the human Will or human Freedom" was "also raised to Platonic self-subsistence in that intelligible, though unreachable, empyreal world . . . which was to replace God in actual fact as supreme source and origin of Natural Law." Maritain, 56-57. After these thinkers, "Natural Law was to be deduced from the so-called autonomy of the Will." Maritain, 57. So we have such inanities spouted by even such thinkers as Kant and Rousseau:

"A person," Kant wrote, "is subject to no other laws than those which he (either alone or jointly with others) gives to himself." In other words, man must "obey only himself," as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, because every measure or regulation springing from the world of nature (and finally from creative wisdom) would destroy at one and the same time his autonomy and his supreme dignity.

Maritain, 57.**

Such a doctrine is fatal to law, and is fatal to the notion of right. "The rights of the human person," under these notions, "were to be based on the claim that man is subject to no law other than that of his own will and freedom." Maritain, 57. This is self-law, which is no law at all. And so, Maritain appropriately ends his quick historical analysis with this conclusion, which, though lengthy, merits being quoted in full:

This philosophy built no solid foundations for the rights of the human person, because nothing can be founded on illusion: it compromised and squandered these rights, because it led men to conceive them as rights in themselves divine, hence infinite, escaping every objective measure, denying every limitation imposed upon the claim of the ego, and ultimately expressing the absolute independence of the human subject and a so-called absolute right--which supposedly pertains to everything in the human subject by the mere fact that it is in him--to unfold one's cherished possibilities at the expense of all other beings. When men thus instructed clashed on all sides with the impossible, they came to believe in the bankruptcy of the rights of the human person. Some have turned against these rights with an enslaver's fury; some have continued to invoke them, while in their inmost conscience they are weighed down to scepticism which is one of the most alarming symptoms of the crisis of our civilization.

Maritain, 57-58.

To which I can only say, "Amen, Brother Maritain!"


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*Google "Madonna," especially under an image search, and see when you first get a hit on Our Lady, and not the notorious pop singer.
*Maritain quotes Kant's Introduction to the Metaphysicas of Morals, IV.24 and Rousseau's The Social Contract, I.6. The entirety of Kant's quote is:

A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws (whereas psychological personality is merely the ability to be conscious of one's identity in different conditions of one's existence). From this it follows that a person is subject to no other laws than those he gives to himself (either alone or at least along with others). (Mary J. Gregor, trans.)

Person ist dasjenige Subject, dessen Handlungen einer Zurechnung fähig sind. Die moralische Persönlichkeit ist also nichts anders, als die Freiheit eines vernünftigen Wesens unter moralischen Gesetzen (die psychologische aber bloß das Vermögen, sich der Identität seiner selbst in den verschiedenen Zuständen seines Daseins bewußt zu werden), woraus dann folgt, daß eine Person keinen anderen Gesetzen als denen, die sie (entweder allein, oder wenigstens zugleich mit anderen) sich selbst giebt, unterworfen ist.

The full cite to Rousseau is:

"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution. (G.D.H. Cole, trans.)

Cette difficulté ramenée à mon sujet peut s'énoncer en ces termes: "Trouver une forme d'association qui défende et protège de toute la force commune la personne et les biens de chaque associé, et par laquelle chacun s'unissant à tous n'obéisse pourtant qu'à lui-même et reste aussi libre qu'auparavant." Tel est le problème fondamental dont le contrat social donne la solution.

Pope Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences

On May 4, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the participants in the fifteenth Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is charged with the mission of advancing the Church's social doctrine in the areas of the economy, politics, law, and other social sciences. The focus of the session was human rights, what the Pope called a "a point of encounter between the doctrine of the Church and contemporary society."

The world’s great religions and philosophies have illuminated some aspects of these human rights, which are concisely expressed in “the golden rule” found in the Gospel: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Lk 6:31; cf. Mt 7:12). The Church has always affirmed that fundamental rights, above and beyond the different ways in which they are formulated and the different degrees of importance they may have in various cultural contexts, are to be upheld and accorded universal recognition because they are inherent in the very nature of man, who is created in the image and likeness of God. If all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, then they share a common nature that binds them together and calls for universal respect. The Church, assimilating the teaching of Christ, considers the person as “the worthiest of nature” (St. Thomas Aquinas, De potentia, 9, 3) and has taught that the ethical and political order that governs relationships between persons finds its origin in the very structure of man’s being. The discovery of America and the ensuing anthropological debate in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe led to a heightened awareness of human rights as such and of their universality (ius gentium). The modern period helped shape the idea that the message of Christ – because it proclaims that God loves every man and woman and that every human being is called to love God freely – demonstrates that everyone, independently of his or her social and cultural condition, by nature deserves freedom. At the same time, we must always remember that “freedom itself needs to be set free. It is Christ who sets it free” (Veritatis Splendor, 86).

The Pope observed that the tragic suffering called by the world wars and the crimes against humanity spurred the formation of a new system of international law based upon the notion of human rights.

Human rights became the reference point of a shared universal ethos – at least at the level of aspiration – for most of humankind. These rights have been ratified by almost every State in the world. The Second Vatican Council, in the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae, as well as my predecessors Paul VI and John Paul II, forcefully referred to the right to life and the right to freedom of conscience and religion as being at the centre of those rights that spring from human nature itself.

These human rights are predicated on reason, on the natural law which participates in the eternal law. Though based upon reason, and so accessible by reason alone, revelation both confirms and enlightens our knowledge of the natural law.

Strictly speaking, these human rights are not truths of faith, even though they are discoverable – and indeed come to full light – in the message of Christ who “reveals man to man himself” (Gaudium et Spes, 22). They receive further confirmation from faith. Yet it stands to reason that, living and acting in the physical world as spiritual beings, men and women ascertain the pervading presence of a logos which enables them to distinguish not only between true and false, but also good and evil, better and worse, and justice and injustice. This ability to discern – this radical agency – renders every person capable of grasping the “natural law”, which is nothing other than a participation in the eternal law: “unde…lex naturalis nihil aliud est quam participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura” (St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, 91, 2). The natural law is a universal guide recognizable to everyone, on the basis of which all people can reciprocally understand and love each other. Human rights, therefore, are ultimately rooted in a participation of God, who has created each human person with intelligence and freedom. If this solid ethical and political basis is ignored, human rights remain fragile since they are deprived of their sound foundation.

The Church’s action in promoting human rights is therefore supported by rational reflection, in such a way that these rights can be presented to all people of good will, independently of any religious affiliation they may have. Nevertheless, as I have observed in my Encyclicals, on the one hand, human reason must undergo constant purification by faith, insofar as it is always in danger of a certain ethical blindness caused by disordered passions and sin; and, on the other hand, insofar as human rights need to be re-appropriated by every generation and by each individual, and insofar as human freedom – which proceeds by a succession of free choices – is always fragile, the human person needs the unconditional hope and love that can only be found in God and that lead to participation in the justice and generosity of God towards others (cf. Deus Caritas Est, 18, and Spe Salvi, 24).

The Pope pointed to the "flagrant contrast" between the "attribution of rights and the unequal access to the means of attaining those rights." He urged leaders to collaborate in reducing the gap between the theory of human rights and their practice. Recently returned from Africa, the Pope expressed solicitude to that one-fifth of humanity that tragically "still goes hungry."

For Christians who regularly ask God to “give us this day our daily bread”, it is a shameful tragedy that one-fifth of humanity still goes hungry. Assuring an adequate food supply, like the protection of vital resources such as water and energy, requires all international leaders to collaborate in showing a readiness to work in good faith, respecting the natural law and promoting solidarity and subsidiarity with the weakest regions and peoples of the planet as the most effective strategy for eliminating social inequalities between countries and societies and for increasing global security.

He exhorted the participants to continue their efforts, and to be "credible and consistent witnesses to the defense and promotion of these non-negotiable human rights which are founded in divine law."


For a copy of the Pope's address, click here.