Catholic Social Doctrine and Human Rights: From Rejection to Endorsement?

This paper examines the evolution of Catholic social doctrine on the topic of human rights. Its purpose is to explain how official Catholic doctrine moved from an initial rejection of such rights throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, to an ostensible endorsement of them in the second half of the 20th century. The argument advanced is that the Church effectively co-opted human rights by transforming the meaning that was historically assigned to them. Whereas such rights were originally construed as expressions of an 'individualist' and 'contractualist' social philosophy ultimately founded on the idea of human autonomy, over the course of the past half-century the Church has progressively re-styled them as correlates of a 'neo-thomistic' idea of natural law. In this way it has been able to endorse human rights without relinquishing any of the foundational principles of its critique of modernity.