Human Rights and the 'Moral Structure of Freedom'
At the beginning of this last year of the second Christian millennium,
the Bishop of Rome has written a New Year’s message to commemorate
the 50th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Declaration
of Human Rights on Dec. 10, 1948. Over a half-century ago, in
the wake of the Second World War, the United Nations put together
a declaration on human rights which has grown in influence during
the last half of our now fading century.
There is some irony in the Pope’s becoming the world’s foremost
defender of human rights, since his predecessors were hesitant
to adopt the language of “rights”. The first Pope to speak “rights
language” explicitly was Pope Pius XII. In his 1942 Christmas
message, widely interpreted at the time as a criticism of the
Nazi regime, Pius XII spoke of the right to life, to religious
freedom, to family life, to work, to choose a way of life and
to make use of one’s private property. Pope John XXIII in 1962
presented a charter of human rights based on natural law. None
of these papal messages, nor the treatment of human dignity in
the documents of the Second Vatican Council, sounds exactly like
the U.S. Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the federal
Constitution.
The U.S. Bill of Rights is grounded in 18th Century social contract
theory and was forged in a post-revolutionary conviction that
the individual had to be protected from an always potentially
tyrannical government. Our Constitutional rights are therefore
largely negative: “freedom from” external constraint. Historically,
the modern inventors of rights language were as suspicious of
the Church as they were of the King. It took a couple of centuries,
enough time to get well removed from the modern political genesis
of “rights language”, before the Church could pick up the language
of human rights and transform it. In the documents of the Second
Vatican Council, the source of human rights is not a social contract,
real or imagined, but the human dignity born of our being created
in God’s image and likeness. The Church pictures human rights
as guaranteeing the common good; and individuals have “freedom
for”: freedom for creating a just society with government as promoter
rather than obstacle to human freedom. We are naturally social,
and governmental and economic structures should foster our solidarity.
Human dignity is also the basic concept of the U.N. Declaration
of Human Rights. French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain
had a hand in producing it, as did philosophers and political
scientists from the University of Chicago. It includes social
and economic rights as well as political rights. It presupposes
that all persons are related, whereas the U.S. Bill of Rights
works out of a more individualistic view. Since the U.N. document
is so idealistic, it has taken several later covenants and international
conferences to work out the practical consequences, much as it
has taken two centuries of jurisprudence to work out the consequences
of the U.S. Bill of Rights. Pragmatically, the American approach
has provided a juridical basis for a stable political and economic
order in which personal freedom has been largely protected; the
United Nations document is still not completely proven, but it
has provided a benchmark for the national constitutions of those
countries born after the Second World War spelled the demise of
colonialism.
Pope John Paul II has a profound commitment to human freedom and
a strong sense of its enemies. In his last speech to the United
Nations, he spoke of defending “the moral structure of freedom”
from the two great ideological utopias of this dying century.
The first is the totalitarian utopia of “justice without freedom”.
European Fascism began in the 1930s as a program promising justice;
national socialism would protect Germans, Austrians and Italians
against the tyranny of international capitalism, deliver people
from the Great Depression and restore their national dignity.
Fascism was followed by the Communist regimes, which also promised
justice by protecting workers from the tyranny of the same international
capitalism. They destroyed human freedom and were unable to establish
genuine justice. In the name of a presumed justice, persons were
deprived of liberty, stripped of the most elementary rights, imprisoned
and slain. While Pope John Paul II did much to give oppressed
peoples the courage to bring about the collapse of Marxist regimes,
the internal contradictions of a false theory made communist political
institutions and economic structures inherently unstable. It is,
of course, much easier to recognize this in 1999 than it was at
the beginning of 1989.
The second great ideological utopia of this century is still very
much with us; it is the libertarian utopia of “freedom without
truth”. It is also unstable and will not, in the long run, sustain
human rights and freedom because it is deliberately agnostic about
the truth and value of the human person. Increasingly, the United
States seems to be developing into a libertarian utopia, a society
based on freedom without truth. We have the right, it seems, to
be whatever we decide to be rather than what we have been created
to be. This is a formula for despair.
In response, the Pope speaks of respect for human beings and all
their rights: the right to life and to religious freedom; the
right to participate in society, no matter one’s race, gender,
culture or economic class; the right to develop one’s talents
and to work for the good of oneself, of one’s family and of society
as a whole. The Pope warns that a new division could easily replace
the ideological strife of the Cold War. Peoples could be divided
between those who have access to advanced technologies and those
without such means of development. In this context, the Pope calls
again for global solidarity and speaks of a right to peace. “Only
when a culture of human rights which respects different traditions
becomes an integral part of humanity’s moral patrimony shall we
be able to look to the future with serene confidence.”
In his message for the last New Year’s Day of this millennium,
the Holy Father has told us to become “heralds of human dignity”.
His words put a lot of what passes each day for political, economic
and social wisdom into a perspective that gives real hope for
the next millennium.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.
Archbishop of Chicago
