Catholic Cosmopolitanism and the Future of Human Rights (original) (raw)

Catholic Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, Cambridge University Press (March 5, 2020)

Catholic Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, Cambridge University Press (March 5, 2020), 2020

It is because Catholicism played such a formative role in the construction of Western legal culture that it is the focal point of this enquiry. The account of international law from its origin in the treaties of Westphalia, and located in the writing of the Grotian tradition, had lost contact with another cosmopolitan history of international law that reappeared with the growth of the early 20th century human rights movement. The beginnings of the human rights movement, grounded in democratic sovereign power, returned to that moral vocabulary to promote the further growth of international order in the 20th century. In recognising this technique of periodically returning to Western cosmopolitan legal culture, this book endeavours to provide a more complete account of the human rights project that factors in the contribution that cosmopolitan Catholicism made to a general theory of sovereignty, international law and human rights. [150 words – 1200 characters ]

Catholic Social Thought and Human Rights

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2015

As the dominant moral vocabulary of modernity, the language of human rights establishes significant points of contact between the religious and the secular. Yet, the human rights movement increasingly finds itself in a contested relationship with religious ideas and communities. Even as it draws on the inherited moral resources of religion, the human rights movement, at least in its dominant institutional and intellectual expressions, presents itself as a totalizing moral theory that challenges countervailing theological accounts of human rights. This article considers the distinctive account of human rights that has emerged within Catholic social teaching. Particular attention is given to the process by which Catholic thinking about human rights has embraced political liberalism while also bounding liberalism within a particularistic theologically-informed account of the human person. *** The Roman Catholic Church is one of the leading proponents of human rights in the world today. Traveling the globe and speaking on behalf of the poor and defenseless against the abuse of power by states and terrorist groups, popes enunciate a moral vision that is intended to hold accountable all human institutions. For example, in a public speech in Albania in September 2014, Pope Francis denounced any group that would take "actions against human dignity and against the fundamental rights of every man and woman, above all to the right to life and the right of everyone to religious freedom" (Guardian 2014). This was not an unusual speech for the Pope. In fact, it is in line with speeches and encyclicals that have given human rights an increasingly important place in Catholic thought over the past century. The concern for human rights is central to Catholic social teaching,

CATHOLIC CONTRIBUTIONS AND CRITIQUES OF HUMAN RIGHTS LAW WITHIN EUROPEAN INSTITUTIONS

2014

With regard to the EU, we are accustomed to talking about a democratic deficit. This expression is a euphemism, as if a political regime is not fully democratic, the question immediately becomes how is an incomplete democracy "completed"? Whether we have there "a surplus" of autocracy, bureaucracy or of something else? Regardless the answer, there is awareness that we have a problem with democracy (see: Karlsruhe ruling on Lisbon Treaty). It results not due to the luck of good will, but to the fact that democracy as political regime was invented in the history only for small political entities, like Greek polis, and in the modern time was applied to the nation-state level. Strictly speaking, democracy is not possible at the international level.

Catholicism and Democracy in the Age of John Paul II

Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 2001

In discussing "Catholicism and Democracy in the Age of John Paul II," I hope to develop several themes in the Catholic interaction with modern history that were of intense interest to Lord Acton. In describing history as the history of liberty, and in stressing the central role of Christianity in the history of liberty, Lord Acton challenged the conventional historiography of his time (and ours) and helped make possible the developments in Catholic social doctrine I shall be discussing in this article. These developments are, I think, of interest far beyond the formal boundaries of the Catholic Church, and engage the concerns of Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and all men and women of goodwill who are concerned about the future of democracy. Let me begin, however, not with Lord Acton, but with another distinguished British historian. In the early 1980s, Sir Michael Howard, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, suggested in a conversation that there l o g o s 4 : 3 s u m m e r 2 0 0 1 This article was originally delivered October 23, 2000 as The Acton Lecture on Religion and Freedom at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia.

The State in the Modern World: Gaudium et Spes and a Post-Conciliar Fundamental Political Theology

Recent controversies have brought the relationship between the Church and the common good of a plural community front to the minds of Catholics in the United States. Those issues really are not a struggle over religious liberty so much as a symptom of what John Courtney Murray observed in 1966: “No formal document on the relations between Church and state issued from Vatican Council II.” The Council’s most sustained observations on that relationship are found in Gaudium et Spes, where we find a lengthy reflection on the meaning of the common good. We cannot determine the boundaries of the church-state relationship without understanding the common good. Medieval thinkers developed the concept, and modern thinkers have given it a range of treatments. Jacques Maritain preferred to think of the common good in terms of a global human community, while another strain of Thomist thought would not disentangle the common good of the human community from its supernatural end. Swiss philosopher Martin Rhonheimer has identified the common good with modern, constitutional democracy and has distinguished policy outcomes that serve the common good from the institutional, procedural arrangements also necessary for the common good. Fundamentally, I ask a political question with ecclesiological implications as much as an ecclesiological question with political implications: whether the common good is understood only through the Church’s moral authority, or may be interpreted within the frame of a plural political community. This paper begins from Gaudium et Spes (“It is highly important, especially in pluralistic societies, that a proper view exist of the relation between the political community and the Church.”), and builds from Rhonheimer’s work to suggest a role for Catholic citizens and the moral witness of the Church in a plural community shaped by the limits and the possibilities of politics.

CATHOLIC CHURCH'S TEACHINGS ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND CHALLENGES

Few people today would doubt that the Catholic Church is a great champion of human rights, yet the Church has not always viewed the concept of human rights as a positive thing. In the first part of this chapter we have a journey of the Catholic Church from an outright rejection of human rights to a very active and committed proclamation of human rights is instructive for us all as we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Monsignor Franco Biffi, of the Lateran and Gregorian Universities, describes the Church's engagement with the idea of human rights as having passed through four sub division such as: rejection; discernment; dialogue; and proclamation. Second part I am going to discuss about the challenges of human rights in the present time it is going to discuss in different manner such as International/cross-border dimension of violations, Responsibility of multiple actors, Effective monitoring and implementation and Human rights imperialism and exceptionalism. After this part I am going to discuss about the future of human rights.