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The Fundamental Human Rights and the Catholic Church before the Challenge of the So-Called New Rights

Presentation by Danijela Rupčić, PhD

            The efficient proclamation of human dignity is a prerequisite for respecting all other human rights. Its real inviolability is closely tied to the inviolability of the human life and biological essence of a human being. Despite the actual contents of the proclaimed rights and existing codifications of the fundamental human rights, arising after the World Wars, when everything seemed clear in that regard, using the triple pressure of re-interpreted individual freedoms, right to private life and self-determination as well as the parallel non-discrimination, contemporary turbulences have opened the path toward the creation of so-called new rights. They are, for example, the “right” to abortion, “right” to gender identity, “right” to dignified death, all interfering with the concept of the inviolability of the human dignity. For those so-called rights, the spaces of individual freedoms and personal choices have proven to be too narrow. Even though they arose under the depositivisation of rights, they now strive to achieve the imperativity of legal norms, with aspirations toward absolutisation, i.e. elevation to the highest level, that of the fundamental human rights. However, the very purpose of the right – regardless of the fact that it is a human artefact as well as a temporally and spatially mutable reality – requires a comprehensive fulfilment of the necessary criteria in three aspects: phenomenology, legal logic, and deontology. In any normative and interpretative or implementational application, it is necessary to answer the three fundamental questions: what is the right like, what is the right, and what it should be like. Thus, from the phenomenological aspect, it is necessary to test the limits and all effects of the human choice by analysing the casual relationship between the act and the consequence, involving all affected interests for the purpose of building a regulated legal regime. The legal logic requires respecting the principle of non-contradiction, preventing the introduction of a right that would suppress the existing rights or reason itself, while deontology guarantees that the criteria of justice and good will be fulfilled. However, the above criteria are neglected, and new rights are being created non-comprehensively, which leads to a susceptibility to ideological interventions that take advantage of social constructs, penetrating into the very anthropology of man, possibly even under the guise of exercising some proclaimed, but particular good. All that has an impact on the society as a whole, leading to a change of an era, bringing about chaos and legal uncertainty in the legal and social order.

            What does the Catholic Church have to do with it? The right and obligation of the Church is to announce, “always and everywhere”, “moral principles, even about the social order, and to render judgment concerning any human affairs insofar as the fundamental rights of the human person or the salvation of souls requires it” (Code of Canon Law, Can. 747). For faithful Catholics, the relationship with God is a constituent element of not only their existence, but also their essence. Therefore, the duty of the Church to teach at the time of the so-called new rights, which intervene in the fundamental human values and negate the fundamental truths, is of utmost importance. All believers are called to holiness as well as responsible and dutiful participation in the mission of salvation entrusted by the Christ to the Church, and that mission extends to the entire society. Even though religious freedoms are incardinated in the foundations of the contemporary liberal states as regards their understanding of human rights and civil liberties – the contribution of the Christian culture in proclaiming the fundamental human rights being impossible to ignore – the Catholic Church, like other religious communities, is today faced with the burden of proving the legitimacy of the fundamental values of its own Teachings, particularly when it comes to the implementation of individual believers’ rights. In this analysis, we will endeavour to present an overview of the relation between the Church and the fundamental human rights as well as how the Church responds to the challenges of the so-called new rights being created.

Key words: fundamental human rights, the duty of the Church to teach, canon law, new rights