Benedict’s Plea

WHEN POPE Benedict XVI addressed the United Nations in New York on April 18, it was a significant, but not unexpected event. To the contrary, it is now expected that the universal pastor of the Church will have a word for those who concern themselves with the very worldly affairs of the United Nations. These periodic visits are occasions when a voice of moral conscience comes to the councils of power.

Pope Paul VI

It was an electric day in October 1965 when Pope Paul VI first traveled to New York and offered a papal Mass for the first time in the western hemisphere. Perhaps the most dramatic moment of the event was his visit to the United Nations, where he exclaimed, “Never again war!”

Pope Benedict XVI addressed the United Nations on April 18, following the example of Pope John Paul II, who himself addressed the United Nations in 1979, and again in 1995. He took as this theme human rights, noting that this year marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And he had two major points to make. First, that human rights are truly universal, and may not be abridged for political, cultural or even religious reasons. Second, that the United Nations was the privileged place to protect human rights, and that indeed, it bears responsibility to do so in places where sustained human rights violations are occurring.

Transcendent truth

“The Holy Father provided the United Nations with a philosophically and morally grounded reason for its existence,” said well-known American author, Father Richard John Neuhaus. “All the talk about human rights is just talk unless it is grounded in the dignity of the human person, which in turn is grounded in transcendent truth.”

Facing a world in which human rights are increasingly important in politics, Benedict argued that the most sure foundation of human rights is a transcendent vision of the human person. If, on the contrary, human rights are only a matter of political consensus, then they are only secure as long as the consensus continues to exist.

“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the outcome of a convergence of different religious and cultural traditions, all of them motivated by the common desire to place the human person at the heart of institutions, laws and the workings of society, and to consider the human person essential for the world of culture, religion and science,” Benedict said. “Human rights are increasingly being presented as the common language and the ethical substratum of international relations. At the same time, the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of human rights all serve as guarantees safeguarding human dignity. It is evident, though, that the rights recognized and expounded in the Declaration apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God’s creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks. This great variety of viewpoints must not be allowed to obscure the fact that not only rights are universal, but so too is the human person, the subject of those rights.”

Universal vision

That’s a mouthful, but the argument is that human rights are universal because human nature is universal. Natural law – reflection on how we should behave given who we are – is rooted in that human nature. And natural law itself is rooted in a vision of the human person as the “high point of God’s creative design for the world and history.”

If that view is abandoned, Benedict argues, the result may well be limitations on human rights in the name of politics or culture or religion. In the 20th century, Communism limited human rights in the name of politics. Today, the threat is different. Human rights can be denied on the grounds that different cultures have different approaches to human rights – that argument is made in China. Or religious beliefs can justify denial of human rights, as is the case today with some models of Islam. In the face of such threats, Benedict proposes a truly universal vision, rooted in the transcendent dignity of the human person.

“Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made,” continues Benedict. “If States are unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations Charter and in other international instruments. The action of the international community and its institutions, provided that it respects the principles undergirding the international order, should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation of sovereignty. On the contrary, it is indifference or failure to intervene that do the real damage.”

Responsibility to protect

Here Benedict arrives at a difficult point. The responsibility of the state is to protect the human rights of its citizens. But what happens when it cannot do so, or even worse, when it actively suppresses those rights? The United Nations has recently developed the concept of a ‘responsibility to protect’ which justifies outside intervention to restore human rights. Benedict endorses that idea in principle, but does not address the further practical question of what is to be done if the United Nations cannot agree on a common course of action. Should individual states then take that ‘responsibility to protect’ upon themselves? That question is left unanswered. Yet it is urgent, for the Holy Father argues that human rights offer the best hope for a peaceful future.

“The life of the community, both domestically and internationally, clearly demonstrates that respect for rights, and the guarantees that follow from them, are measures of the common good that serve to evaluate the relationship between justice and injustice, development and poverty, security and conflict,” Benedict said. “The promotion of human rights remains the most effective strategy for eliminating inequalities between countries and social groups, and for increasing security. Indeed, the victims of hardship and despair, whose human dignity is violated with impunity, become easy prey to the call to violence, and they can then become violators of peace. The common good that human rights help to accomplish cannot, however, be attained merely by applying correct procedures, nor even less by achieving a balance between competing rights. The merit of the Universal Declaration is that it has enabled different cultures, juridical expressions and institutional models to converge around a fundamental nucleus of values, and hence of rights”.

Next month we will look at another important aspect of Benedict’s UN speech, namely the relationship between faith and politics, especially in regard to the most basic human right of all: religious liberty.