On October 16, members of the Catholic Law Students Association and Advocates for Human Rights came together for a talk about Pope Francis and human rights. The discussion was led by law and history professor Samuel Moyn, the author of a recent Washington Post article with the eye-catching title “Pope Francis has given up on human rights. That’s a good thing.”
“I did write the article, but I didn’t write that title!” Professor Moyn protested at the start of the talk. “I would have called it ‘Pope Francis is de-prioritizing talking about human rights, and that might be a good thing—maybe.’”
Moyn outlined a brief history of the papacy’s changing relationship with the concept of “human rights.” The Vatican treated the assertion of individual “rights” with considerable hostility during the centuries following the American and French revolutions, which it associated with a breakdown of moral order and the establishment of secular states.
Papal encyclicals at the beginning of the twentieth century followed this long-established tradition, but the Vatican began to change its script in the 1930s, when the rise of totalitarian European states seemed to imperil both liberal democracy and the Church alike.
“Some right-wing Catholics advocated ‘state capture’ as one method of preserving Church authority,” Moyn explained, but the success of right-wing parties in Italy and Germany whose interests aligned little with those of the Church demonstrated the inherent risks of this method.
Popes beginning with Pius XI in 1937 began to favor the vocabulary of “rights” to defend the free exercise of religion within oppressive states, as well as the property protections that the Church viewed as essential to the preservation of a Christian social order. The Vatican has since played a large role in popularizing the rhetoric of individual human rights, with Pope John Paul II frequently deploying it in an anti-totalitarian context throughout his papacy.
Pope Francis, however, has been less likely to frame moral imperatives in terms of “rights” than his immediate predecessors, Moyn claimed, drawing a comparison between the frequency of Pope Benedict XVI’s use of the term “human rights” and Francis’s more modest tally.
Moyn hypothesized that Francis’s emphasis on global problems such as poverty and the environment has necessitated a shift away from the language of individual rights, since these problems require collective, structural solutions.
Francis is not, however, a “completely consistent philosopher,” Moyn emphasized, pointing to examples such as Francis’s promotion of the “basic and universal human right” to water in his environmental encyclical Laudato Si, as well a statement about the “right to conscientious objection”—interpreted by some as an expression of support for Kim Davis or for the Little Sisters of the Poor—at the end of his recent U.S. tour.
Audience questions focused discussion on the complex relationships between human rights NGOs and the Catholic Church in Latin America, as well as the extent to which the Church’s changing usage of “human rights” language reflected a shift in terminology rather than a shift in principle.
“It’s true that charting word usage isn’t the same as charting meaning,” Moyn said, but argued that the papacy’s twentieth-century adoption of human rights language was more than a mere “reformatting” of previously-held beliefs.
“Before the 1930s many Catholics chose social strategies that strengthened the state and thus limited individual rights. Taking over the state seemed like an appealing option, but led to frightening results. So while there may have been continuity of ideas on a basic moral level, there was a real change in the way the Church thought about state capture, and that went on to have implications for certain moral values.”
Today, in the face of 21st-century problems, it seems that Pope Francis wants to emphasize that the assertion of individual rights over the collective good is a policy that creates its own set of evils.
“Francis is correct to be suspicious of rights,” Moyn said. “For most of history, when we’ve talked about rights we’ve been talking about the protection of property rights and freedom of contract. If your goal is to tackle poverty and redistribute resources, you may have to move away from the idea of rights.”