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1 results

  • 4 - Catholic Social Doctrine and Human Rights

  • from Part II - European Catholicism and Human Rights
  • Edited by Sarah Shortall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
  • Book:
    Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered
    Published online:
    26 September 2020
    Print publication:
    24 September 2020, pp 81-102

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the evolution of Catholic social doctrine on the topic of human rights. Its purpose is to explain how official Catholic doctrine moved from an initial rejection of such rights throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to an ostensible endorsement of them in the second half of the twentieth century. The argument advanced is that the Church effectively co-opted human rights by transforming the meaning historically assigned to them. Whereas such rights were originally construed as expressions of an “individualist” and “contractualist” social philosophy ultimately founded on the idea of human autonomy, over the course of the past half-century the Church has progressively restyled them as correlates of a “neo-Thomistic” idea of natural law. In this way it has been able to endorse human rights without relinquishing any of the foundational principles of its critique of modernity.