Rome and the Rights of Man

Actons speak louder than words.

Now where was I? A few days ago, to commemorate UN Human Rights Day, I was commenting on how poorly our own North American governments do at honouring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

If you recall that post, of if you look it up, you may be struck by how often, when our governments violate basic human rights, the clearest voice calling government out on this is the Catholic Church: on personhood, on the right to life, on freedom of conscience, on the rights of the family. This is no accident.

First, like it or not, the doctrine of human rights has clearly Christian origins, and is based on Christian assumptions. We have rights because, in the words of the US Declaration of Independence, we are endowed with them by our Creator. Muslims are the first to point this out, often arguing that the idea of human rights is discriminatory against Islam if accepted without qualifications. Specifically, in Islam, salvation is more a corporate matter, not an individual one: rights to individual conscience are therefore a problem. For the same reason, Islam has problems with the idea of separation of church and state.

The problems for a religion like Hinduism or Buddhism are worse. There is no question, in Hinduism, that all men are created equal. Of course they are not. Hence the legitimacy of the caste system. While Hindu and Buddhist ideas of reincarnation might seem favourable to animal rights, they are fatal to human rights. If a human is in principle no different in moral being from a tapeworm, and we have the right to kill a tapeworm if it is inconvenient to us, then we also have the right to kill inconvenient humans. And separation of church and state would be at least as big a problem for the Dalai Lama as for the Taliban.

No offense meant to non-Christians; it is just so. We all need to accept it.

And, this being so, there are obvious conclusions to be drawn. For example, it is naive to suppose we can allow large-scale non-Christian immigration without sacrificing our ideal of human rights. They're gone. Is everybody okay with this? And if they're gone, do we have any alternative unifying ideology on the basis of which we can build a society? Because without shared social ideals, a society cannot live at peace or function well, without coercion.

It is also, accordingly, suicidal for genuine believers in human rights to turn on the Church and paint it as the enemy of such rights—as is happening currently with regard to supposed “women's rights” and “gay rights.” This argument is a Trojan Horse, which ends up rendering all rights purely arbitrary.

It also seems to be a pipe dream, this fundamental difference on the foundations of society being so, to think in terms of a united world, with a one-world government, at any time before the Second Coming.

Next, we must realize that the Catholic Church is the great international defender of human rights. Always has been. Conceptually, since Magna Carta, human rights have been rights of the individual against government. Accordingly, you cannot look to any government as the ultimate protector of your rights—that is putting the fox in charge of the hen house. This includes an international government entity like the United Nations. It is precisely the countries most vulnerable to charges of violating the Universal Charter who vie most energetically for seats on the Human Rights panel. This way, they can count on subverting it in practice.

To defend human rights, you need an independent organization, fully international, separate from government, not vulnerable to control by any one government, but with broadly accepted moral authority. 

The Red Cross. Anyone else detect a Christian reference here?

There just isn't another organization that fills this bill nearly so well as the Catholic Church. The closest thing that comes to mind is the Red Cross; but it too is a recognizably Christian organization. Originally, all members of its governing assembly had to be Protestant Christians of Swiss nationality, although exceptions have since been made. It is, in effect, a Protestant facsimile of the Vatican. It suffers by comparison, because it really is quite vulerable to control by the Swiss government, if and when Swiss interests might be involved.