20 Apr Pope Benedict XVI on Human Rights
Pope Benedict XVI’s address at the United Nations General Assembly last week is definitely worth a read for anyone concerned about human rights. Here is an interesting excerpt on the natural law underpinnings of all human rights:
This reference to human dignity, which is the foundation and goal of the responsibility to protect, leads us to the theme we are specifically focusing upon this year, which marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document 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. 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.
Diane Marie Amann has more here, particularly on the Pope’s affirmation of the “responsibility to protect.”
3 cases:
Von Wrenich, a priest that helped the Argentine military dictatorship by taking confessions and later transmited them to the military. He still enjoys his clergy status, although he is a convicted Human Rights Violator
Military Chaplain general,Baseotto, who said that a minister who supported equal rights for gays, shouold be trown out of a plane into the sea with a mill stone tied to his neck. This priest said those things a few weeks before Ratzinger became Pope, and was never criticized or removed from his post until he quit.
Pope Jhon Paul II had a meeting with Nobel Peace Prize, Adolfo Ezquivel. Ezquivel went to the Vatican to plea for several dozen children who had been dissapeared. The Pope told him that he should be thinking about those children in commmunist countries.