Catholic Rights Talk

Talk about rights is common both in American political discourse and in Catholic Social Thought. Certainly rights place a central role in the American Constitutional order. For many it is the Bill of Rights, which its protections of the rights of speech, religious exercise, due process, and so on, that is the defining characteristic of our government, to the point that other considerations (e.g. federalism) are also expressed in terms of rights (e.g. states’ rights). Likewise, rights have played a fundamental role in our moral discourse from the time of the Declaration of Independence down to the present day (for a full treatment of the place of rights in American political and moral discussion, I would highly recommend Rights Talk by Harvard professor and current U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon).

The Church’s embrace of rights talk is more recent but has become no less widespread. Pick up a Church document or statement relating to Catholic Social Thought and you are likely to encounter a whole bevy of rights: the right to property, the right to associate, the right to health care, decent housing, and a just wage.

Yet despite the common vocabulary, I would argue that the concept of rights use in Catholic Social Thought is quite different from the concept of rights current in much of American political thinking. In America, rights are generally thought of as being trumps against the common good. Whether the right in question is negative (in which case it grants the individual immunity from government action regardless of societal consequences) or positive (in which case it grants an entitlement to a certain benefit as a matter of right), the key distinguishing feature of a right is that it allows the needs, decisions, or wants of an individual to trump those of society as a whole.

The notion of rights found in Catholic Social Thought, on the other hand, is quite different. There rights are seen as being limited and defined by the common good, rather than set in opposition to it. The most famous example of this is the right of private property. The Church has long affirmed the right of private property, while simultaneously affirming that “Political authority has the right and duty to regulate the legitimate exercise of the right to ownership for the sake of the common good.” CCC 2406. Similarly, while the Church has long proclaimed a right to association, it nonetheless holds that “the law should intervene to prevent certain associations, as when men join together for purposes which are evidently bad, unlawful, or dangerous to the State.” RN 52. And while the Church in Dignitatis Humanae affirmed the right of religious freedom, it always took care to say that the right was limited by “the just demands of public order.” DH 4.

Now from the perspective of the American conception of rights, such statement are incomprehensible. What, after all, is the purpose of a right if it is limited by the demands of the common good? The answer, I think, lies in the different role that rights play in Catholic Social Thought. Rights, in Catholic Social Teaching, serve as a means of orienting our thinking about questions of social policy. To say, in Catholic Social Thought, that something is a right is to say that it is a constitutive element of the Common Good (which Gaudium et Spes defined as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment“). So, for example, when the Church declares that there is a right to basic health care, what She is saying is that access to basic health care is one of the conditions of social life which allows access to human flourishing and fulfillment, and that achieving this right should be a central goal of social policy. At the same time, however, this right is not seen as an absolute, and may have to give way to other, equally pressing elements of the Common Good.

Thoughts?