CNA explains: How the Catholic view of human rights developed

 

CNA Staff, Jun 24, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

The Catholic Church’s enduring commitment to support human rights — anchored in a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human — has taken on renewed urgency amid recent global conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine war, the war in Gaza, and humanitarian crises like the political fight over migration in the United States.

In his first weeks as pontiff, the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, who chose his name in honor of his predecessor Pope Leo XIII, has emphasized Christ’s call for peace and the respect for the dignity of all people. Papal biographer George Weigel said Leo XIV has the opportunity to continue Leo XIII’s vision of the Church as a “great institutional promoter and defender of basic human rights” in society.

CNA spoke with V. Bradley Lewis, dean of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., about what the Church teaches on human rights and how those teachings have developed over the past few centuries.

Historical roots

Lewis told CNA that contrary to a common misconception, the concept of human rights within Catholic teaching is not a recent addition but rather has roots extending back to the Church’s constant teaching on human dignity, and later in the development of canon law and the thought of theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas — even if the specific terminology of “human rights” developed relatively recently.

“There’s an important sense in which it was not a new thing in modern times, and in which it’s always been a part of the Catholic tradition,” Lewis said.

The Catholic Church has always affirmed the inherent dignity of every human person as a creation in God’s image (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1700). All people have an inherent worth as composites of a mortal body and an immortal soul, and all people are called to have a relationship with God, their creator.

“Every human person, created in the image of God, has the natural right to be recognized as a free and responsible being. All owe to each other this duty of respect. The right to the exercise of freedom, especially in moral and religious matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of the human person. This right must be recognized and protected by civil authority within the limits of the common good and public order” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1738).

Natural law

All rights, from a Catholic perspective, are grounded in natural law, which Lewis said provides the essential context for properly understanding and defending human rights from a Catholic perspective.

There is a right to life because, according to the natural moral law, life is a good that must be protected, Lewis wrote in a 2019 article for the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner. True human rights, then, are derived from natural law and contribute to human flourishing and reasonable ways of living together, he explained.

A problematic way to view rights, he continued, is as purely individual possessions or forms of “individual sovereignty” asserted against others; in contrast, the Catholic way of understanding rights sees them as a framework for understanding and regulating relationships between people within a community.

Various kinds of rights

“There clearly are certain human rights that are absolutely necessary: like the right to life, not to be intentionally killed as an innocent person; rights to religious freedom; rights to family life; things like this. And then there’s lots of other rights that we have that are just legal rights, that can be limited in various ways,” Lewis said.

“And then there are some ‘rights’ that are just totally made up, and that means they could be unmade depending on what we want,” he continued, specifically mentioning in his article societal claims to the existence of “abortion rights, the so-called right to die, homosexual and transgender rights.”

Pope Leo XIII — Leo XIV’s literal and spiritual predecessor — emphasized the rights of workers and the right to private property in his writings as pope from 1878 to 1903. Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s foundational document in Catholic social teaching that addressed the challenges of the industrial revolution, emphasizes a need for reforms to protect the dignity of the working class while maintaining a relationship with capital and the existence of private property.

Recent developments

In 1948, in the wake of World War II, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), influenced in part by the thought of Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, whose work emphasizing the importance of human rights as part of human dignity indirectly influenced the discourse around the declaration, although he wasn’t directly involved in its drafting.

The Church’s teaching developed further throughout the 20th century; St. John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical letter Pacem in Terris includes an extensive catalogue of human rights, including the right to life, the right to respect and to a good name, and the right to education as well as the right to “bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services.”

“In human society one man’s natural right gives rise to a corresponding duty in other men; the duty, that is, of recognizing and respecting that right. Every basic human right draws its authoritative force from the natural law, which confers it and attaches to it its respective duty. Hence, to claim one’s rights and ignore one’s duties, or only half fulfill them, is like building a house with one hand and tearing it down with the other,” St. John XXIII wrote in Pacem in Terris.

The Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Dignitatis Humanae further affirmed the importance of religious freedom, saying this right “has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.”

The relative lateness of these latter writings might lead some people to believe that the Catholic Church “discovered” human rights in the mid-20th century, which is not correct, Lewis said. Rather, the underlying concepts of what we now call human rights have been present among Catholic thinkers for centuries, even if not explicitly named or discussed in the same focal way; for example, within medieval canon law — which became a highly developed legal system — discussions of rights can be found.

“Rights really come into our tradition, really the Western tradition, through law. I think wherever you have a very highly developed legal system and system of legal reasoning, you find an attention to rights. There was more of it there in the legal tradition than there was, for example, among theologians,” Lewis continued.

Lewis said the development of the idea of human rights was in part a response to the rise of modern states and governments.

He noted that the modern state possesses an unprecedented ability to exercise concentrated power, due in large part to technology. This power can enable both incredible good and terrible oppression, and given this modern power, human rights are essential protections against potential state overreach and oppression.

“I don’t know anybody who’d want to live in a modern state without the protection afforded [by] human rights. We don’t live in medieval villages or ancient Greek city states anymore. We live in these incredibly powerful modern states. [Government power] has to be limited,” Lewis said.