Christian Social Thought and Human Rights

Abstract

The category of subjective right is foreign to the cultures from which the Western European legal tradition originates (namely, Jewish culture, as well as Greek and Latin cultures), just as it is foreign to other legal traditions (such as Chinese, Indian and Islamic). The creation of a category of subjective rights emerges as late as the 18^th century, when in the European cultural context of the time the realist conception of law (that of Aristotle, the Roman jurists and Thomas Aquinas, just to name a few) was gradually replaced by a subjectivist and individualist conception, based on the idea of the power of the individual.

The particular individualist background in which the theory of subjective rights was born explains the position, initially taken by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, which did not accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaimed by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789; and, thereafter, for about a century, maintained a closed position with respect to said rights.

The point is that, as the social Magisterium of the Popes of the last century has made clear, the Christian anthropological perspective excludes the possibility of considering the person in his absolute and solitary individuality, built by himself and only on himself, an anomic entity indifferent to others. Similarly, it excludes that one can define the person as an element of a gear or as a cell of an organism whose function would be given by the end (which, respectively, the machine or the organism aims at).

According to Christian social thought, individualism tends to promote anomie, while functionalism and organicism are resolved in corporativism; therefore, neither of these solutions to the problem of social order appears sufficiently solid to counter the totalitarian drift.

On the subject of the rights of the human person, Christian social thought brings to light an original approach based on the notion of the dignity of the human person: created in the image of God; embedded in relationships with others; in interaction with the goods of the universe. Therefore, the tradition of rights, which inspires Christian social thought, is not the libertarian-individualistic or even the collectivist tradition, but the dignitary tradition.

Christian social thought can make a valuable contribution in the search for solutions to some thorny problems that have always accompanied the doctrine of the rights of the human person: in particular, the problem of determining individual rights, as well as their foundation and universality.