Catholics and other people of goodwill now know what they face. And the Vatican in particular needs to rethink what this means for its position at the United Nations

The New Rights at the U.N. Are Dead Wrong

by ROBERT ROYAL

The current stance of the Committee on the Rights of the Child

 reflects a worrisome shift in all the developed nations

 of the world — including the United States.

The disconnect between the original text and what the committee assumes is now the position of all right-thinking people reflects a very worrisome shift in all the developed nations of the world — including the United States.

When the original U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948, it referred mostly to older notions of “rights”: freedom of religion, speech, political opinion, and property rights. Jacques Maritain, the great modern Catholic philosopher who was one of the central figures in the emergence of Christian democracy and also largely responsible for developing the Universal Declaration, said at the time that the nations of the world agreed on it, just so long as you didn’t ask why.

The “why” questions were important — and member states like the Warsaw Pact nations abstained from acceptance of things like property rights and political freedoms, which they had no intention of allowing. But for the most part, these ideological differences were constrained within the need to appear as members in good standing of the international community.

That is no longer the case. And that’s the deeper problem of which the committee report is a more superficial example.

In all developed nations today, it’s a common assumption that the old “political rights” have been superseded by newly found “rights.” Even in the United States — which I tried to defend a decade ago in Venice for its different and important perspective on the dangers of state power — we’ve stumbled into a set of values quite distant from our own traditions.

.........................


Readmore: www.ncregister.com