VATICAN - “Human rights are always in need of being defended. They are in need of fidelity on our part, because they can be lost from view, reinterpreted in a restrictive way or actually denied.” Cardinal Bertone's address at the Commemorative Act for the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – In the Paul VI Hall in the Vatican, a solemn act was organized by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace on December 10, in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Cardinal Renato R. Martino, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, in introducing the solemn event, which was divided into three parts, mentioned that “there is a long Catholic tradition on the subject of human rights. This historic itinerary of the Christian tradition of human rights has certainly not been a peaceful itinerary. There were, in fact, on the part of the magisterium also many reservations and condemnation in face of the affirmation of the rights of man in the wake of the French Revolution; but such reservations, repeatedly manifested by the Pontiffs, especially in the 19th century, were due to the fact that such rights were proposed and affirmed against the liberty of the Church, in a perspective inspired by liberalism and secularism... In the Catholic vision, a correct interpretation and an effective tutelage of the rights depends on an anthropology that embraces the totality of the constitutive dimension of the human person. Human dignity, which is "equal in every person," therefore, the ultimate reason for which the rights can be claimed first of all because they are children of one and the same Father, not by reason of their ethnic, racial and cultural membership. The ensemble of the rights of man must correspond, therefore, to the essence of the dignity of the person. They must refer to the satisfaction of his essential needs, to the exercise of his liberty, to his relations with other persons and with God.”
In his address, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone opened by recalling that “At the moment it was adopted, the Universal Declaration expressed the primacy of liberty against oppression, of the unity of the human family in regard to ideological and political divisions, as well as to differences of race, sex, language and religion. The intention was to defend the person from the idolatry of the state, which totalitarianisms had in fact divinized.”
The list of rights and faculties of the person that the Declaration proposes, focus on man's freedom and his role as a member of the human family. The Cardinal continued: “We are not just faced with a proclamation, but rather with a new consideration and placement of human dignity by the international community and the various political communities that animate it, up to now little inclined to admit the person as protagonist. An approach that is still valid and not replaceable because it calls the person to live his rights with an attitude of sharing the other's rights, and of looking at others not in terms of opposition or limit, but in recognizing their 'essential equality' and determined to live in a 'spirit of fraternity'.”
The Church has seen in the Declaration, a “sign of the times,” “an act able to synthesize the meaning of human liberty by reconciling present-day needs with immutable principles, capable of offering guidelines founded anthropologically and juridically so as to respond to the most profound human needs.” Cardinal Bertone then recalled the idea of fundamental rights has a profound root in the Christian tradition, and in the Church's doctrine, “the tutelage of the human person evokes subsidiarity as ruling principle of the social order and that, beginning with the person, guarantees individual rights and liberty as well as those rights connected with the community dimension.” Cardinal Bertone then recalled the Church's appreciation for the great values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as expressed by Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI in their addresses to the United Nations General Assembly.
Unfortunately, in our day, “basic rights seem to depend on anonymous, uncontrolled mechanisms and on a vision that is enclosed in the pragmatism of the moment, forgetting that the code of the future of the human family is solidarity.” Thus, the question arises “if it is the economic structures and their recent changes that are the cause of the denial of rights, or if it is not, rather, the abandonment of the vision of the person that from subject has become ever more an object of economic conduct.” The Secretary of State mentioned that the criteria that makes human rights universal is the universality of the person. “The lack of tutelage of human rights that is often evidenced in the attitude of so many institutions and functions of the authority is the fruit of the disintegration of the unity of the person about whom thought is given to proclaim different rights, of constructing ample spaces of liberty that, however, remain deprived of every anthropological foundation.”
Sixty years after December 10, 1948, “it does not seem possible any more to guarantee rights if their indivisibility is neglected and if the conviction is not abandoned that the tutelage of civil and political rights passes through a 'not doing' of the institutional apparatus, while the commitment to those that are economic, social and cultural is to be considered only pragmatic.”
Reflecting more specifically on the right to religious freedom, the Cardinal recalled that “the object of that right is not the intrinsic content of a determined religious faith, but immunity from every coercion.” “It is an altogether evident fact that the religious event has a direct influence on the unfolding of the internal life of states and of the international community. This notwithstanding, perceived ever more are indications and tendencies that seem to want to exclude religion and rights from the possibility to contribute to the construction of the social order, also in full respect of the pluralism that marks contemporary society. Religious freedom risks being confused only with freedom of worship or in any case interpreted as an element belonging to the private sphere and increasingly replaced by an imprecise 'right to tolerance.' And all this while ignoring that religious liberty as fundamental right marks the overcoming of religious tolerance.”
Cardinal Bertone continued: “Moreover, once recognized and finally fixed in an eventual convention, human rights are always in need of being defended. They are in need of fidelity on our part, because they can be lost from view, reinterpreted in a restrictive way or actually denied...human rights every day need to be confirmed, re-founded in our consciousness and relived.”
In the concluding part of his address, the Secretary of State mentioned that “ it is ever more difficult to foresee an effective and universal tutelage of rights, without a connection to that natural law that fecundates the same rights and is the antithesis of that degradation that in so many of our societies is interested in questioning the ethics of life and of procreation, of marriage and family life, as well as of education and the formation of the young generations, introducing only an individualistic vision on which to arbitrarily construct new rights that are not more precise in content and juridical logic...Only a weak vision of human rights can hold that the human being is the result of his rights, not recognizing that the rights remain an instrument created by man to give full realization to his innate dignity.” (SL) (Agenzia Fides 11/12/2008)