Benedict XVI at the UN
Bringing a bit of Truth to a body which doesn’t hear it too often:
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. 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. Today, though, efforts need to be redoubled in the face of pressure to reinterpret the foundations of the Declaration and to compromise its inner unity so as to facilitate a move away from the protection of human dignity towards the satisfaction of simple interests, often particular interests.
For the liberals in the audience, what the Holy Father was pointing out is the absolute and self-evident truth that it is human beings who have rights, not groups of human beings. There is no such thing, really, as “women’s rights”, “black rights” or “gay rights” - there are human rights, and humans hold them inherent to their being. All of these efforts to try and redress alleged imbalances and cross-groups injustices will always fail because they seek to deal with human beings in groups, rather than as people - and thus we see things such as affirmative action in America giving most of its benefits not to poor people who may actually have suffered injustice, but to upper class and rich people who are best able to take advantage of the group benefits offered. If you want to ameliorate injustice, then you will have to take the trouble to do it case by case, human by human. The Pope went on:
Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian - a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer. The activity of the United Nations in recent years has ensured that public debate gives space to viewpoints inspired by a religious vision in all its dimensions, including ritual, worship, education, dissemination of information and the freedom to profess and choose religion. It is inconceivable, then, that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves - their faith - in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights. The rights associated with religion are all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an exclusive nature. The full guarantee of religious liberty cannot be limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the possibility of believers playing their part in building the social order.
In a just society, the human beings who believe in God must be allowed to bring this belief in to the public square and use such belief in their efforts to help build the society. To say there is a “wall of separation” between Church and State which precludes believers from attempting to enact their moral views into law really means there is a wall of separation between justice and people. A society cannot be free unless all who are contained within it are allowed to argue their point, and attempt to convince the legitimate law-making bodies that their views should prevail - any attempt to force religion out of the public square or, more absurdly, to claim that an expression of religion is said square is an illegitimate “establishment” of religion is really an attempt to deny liberty, and deny justice to individual human beings who believe in God.
The illness in our society fundamentally stems from the deliberate attempt to expunge the transcendent; from the attempt to try and construct a society where justice is considered secondary in the quest to build a good society. Pope Benedict’s words are a timely reminder of what we really need to do - seek justice first, and the good society will flow from that.
7 comments April 19th, 2008
