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146 Law & Just. - Christian L. Rev. 28 (2001)
Human Rights - Values for a Godless Age

handle is hein.journals/ljusclr146 and id is 30 raw text is: HUMAN RIGHTS - VALUES FOR A GODLESS AGE? CHRISTOPHER DWYER Recognition of human rights can have as its only result 'the overthrow of the Catholic religion'. So said Pope Pius VI in his bull Quod Aliquantum in 1791. He was of course referring to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, promulgated in 1789 by the architects of the French Revolution, and he anathematised every Catholic who accepted it. Today, as we reflect on the recent introduction into U.K. law of the European Convention on Human Rights, developing even further those rights for which the 1789 Declaration provided one of the earliest formal expressions, the Church has - at least at the conceptual level - no problem with human rights. Indeed, only a few years after Pius VI's pronouncement, the bishop who was to succeed him as Pius VII startled his hearers by declaring that there was no incompatibility between Christianity and democracy. Nearly two hundred years later, Pope John XXIH in Pacem in Terris placed human rights firmly in the forefront of the Church's agenda. The anguished ecclesial soul-searching attested by this brief history need not surprise us. Human rights have been implicit in the Church's teaching from its earliest years. Yet until quite recently the Church has felt uncomfortable with them, because it never distilled those implications from its own teaching until the concept had become associated with the deists and atheists who shaped the French Revolution. Early thinking The idea of human rights is older than Christianity, having been first developed by the Greek and Roman Stoics. The early Church did not use the language of human rights, but it focused attention on the need to share possessions, and to care for the hungry, for widows and orphans, and for travellers and prisoners. The Church fathers did not condemn slavery as such, but preached generous treatment for slaves, and within the Christian community slaves and freemen were treated as equals. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it gradually grew subservient to the State, and began its long and unhappy ambivalence towards human rights, including complicity in human rights abuses. The involvement of the Church in slave-owning, the imprisonment and torture of heretics, and the development of the view - famously expressed by St. Augustine - that women

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