Don’t Forget Rights Come from God
By Father Kenneth Wasilewski
In the last column I introduced the third theme of Catholic social teaching — rights and responsibilities. One of the things discussed was the most basic of all human rights, the right to life.
As Americans, this right is enshrined in the very founding of our country — even though at times it has been, and continues to be, legislatively denied to certain segments of the population. However, no law actually has the power to change fundamental human rights.
Those rights may or may not be protected by law, but no law can erase a human right from existing in the first place. This is because of where our fundamental rights come from. Namely, that they come from God.
The fact that we are made in His image and likeness not only provides us with the source of our dignity, but by extension also the origin of our “rights.” Recalling this basic premise is essential to understanding Catholic social teaching. Whatever we claim as the source of our rights will inevitably determine our basic understanding of them.
If we believe that our rights come from political advocacy or government agency, then they become something that only exists so long as there are laws and politicians who uphold them. As such, our rights would change as laws change.
In this scenario no “right” is ever completely or truly a “right” — at least not as long as laws can come and go. However, if rights are ours by virtue of our simply being human, then they can never be taken away — even if they might be suppressed or denied. Any attempt to deny or ignore them becomes an injustice.
The fact that we as Christians understand rights as coming from God and being ours by virtue of sharing in His image means that the most fundamental human rights belong to every person and remain ours throughout the whole of our lives — regardless of any other consideration.
This is especially interesting because, as Americans, we are very familiar with the words from the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
While the Founding Fathers where not operating out of a Catholic worldview, nevertheless they would share some of the same basic tenets when it comes to our rights — including where they saw those rights as ultimately originating from.
Despite this obvious connection between God and human rights — enshrined not simply in a document written nearly 250 years ago, but in our human nature — when we hear that word “rights” we are probably already conditioned to think of it in more of a political sense. This is simply because it is so often used in that context. Likewise, legislative battles frequently use that term to defend whatever position is being advocated for.
But as a theme of Catholic social teaching, any connection between “rights” and the world of politics, is really secondary and ancillary. This means that political and legislative activity is meant to protect our rights that already exist, not invent them or redefine them.
Forgetting this basic fact takes us down a road of incredible confusion and ultimately to a loss of any real sense of fundamental human rights. Sadly, we are witnesses to these very scenarios at times. We see people defending laws as though they are human rights while actual human rights are denied by unjust laws.
Perhaps in these confusing times, we, as Catholics, have to take it upon ourselves to use the wisdom our faith provides as a means to help us sort through the confusion and work toward building a society where laws are used to defend our rights instead of to determine them.