Berkley Center

Rev. David Hollenbach, S.J.’s new book is the capstone of a scholarly career devoted to a critical exposition of the “living tradition” of Catholic social teaching. His magisterial Human Rights in a Divided World (2024) traces the long and contentious developments that led to the Catholic Church’s belated embrace of modern human rights. In this brief contribution, I will first say a word regarding the development of Church doctrine on human rights and then look to the doctrine of development itself—how that is Catholic teaching can develop.

The Development of Doctrine

“To live is to change,” wrote Cardinal Newman, and as Hollenbach shows, the “living faith” of Catholic social teaching changed dramatically with the progressive grafting of subjective rights onto the traditional stalk of natural law. Appeal to natural subjective rights (jus subjectivum) in late medieval canonical jurisprudence gave rise to a plethora of rights by the fourteenth century. Rights were invoked in the Conciliarist reforms of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in Reformation controversies to follow. And in the sixteenth century, as Hollenbach notes, natural rights played a critical role in the impassioned defense of Indigenous peoples by Antonio de Montesinos, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Francisco de Vitoria.

Yet the rich heritage of religious rights’ rhetoric would soon be eclipsed. With the rise of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “positivation” (Positivierung) of classical natural law—that is, natural rights or liberties of rational self-interest—natural law itself succumbs to the secularized doctrines of the Enlightenment. As rights become the currency of a disenchanted modernity, the very idea of individual rights would become increasingly suspect to the reigning popes. Ultramontanist pontiffs harkened back to the ancien régime, its settled hierarchy of multiple status and roles. For Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos Arbitramur, religious liberty was a “crazed absurdity” (deliramentum); and Pius IX’s encyclical Quanta Cura and its appended Syllabus of Errors (1864) railed against modern liberal doctrines such as rationalism, indifferentism, socialism, communism, separation of Church and state, liberty of the press, and religious liberty. For “the Roman Pontif,” there could be no reconciliation with “progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”

“Pur, si muove!” Progress would indeed occur, as the Church reconciled with liberalism and modern civilization. Precipitated by the industrial revolution, the uprooting of the landed peasantry and their migration into the cities, the social and economic ferment of the late nineteenth century raised a new “social question.” The first of the modern social encyclicals, aptly titled Rerum Novarum (“Of new things”) would herald the Church’s belated rapprochement with modernity—a rapprochement, as Hollenbach observes, that culminates in Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris and in the Conciliar texts, Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae.

The Doctrine of Development

Doctrine has developed, but as Hollenbach reminds us, ecclesial acknowledgement is often wanting. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, citing John Paul II’s Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, affirms that the Church’s doctrine “does not depend on the different cultures, ideologies or opinions.” Rather, “it is a constant teaching that ‘remains identical in its fundamental inspiration, in its ‘principles of reflection’, in its ‘criteria of judgment’, in its basic ‘directives for action’, and above all in its vital link with the Gospel of the Lord” (Compendium, no. 85, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, no. 3). Yet such emphasis upon constancy belies the momentous changes that occurred. We are in need, then, of a doctrine of development and here, too, Hollenbach has, I believe, made a significant contribution.

Throughout his book, Hollenbach stresses the leitmotif of human dignity in modern Catholic social teaching. To be sure, belief in dignity figures in our biblical inheritance, but only in the modern era does it become decisive—so much so that we may speak of a reversal of the hermeneutical flow. Where earlier dignity was inscribed within a complex teleology of differing social roles and status, now “the whole of the Church’s social doctrine…develops from the principle that affirms the inviolable dignity of the human person” (Compendium, no. 107, italics in original). In the public realm, a single-status society of equal dignity and rights succeeds to a multi-status society of unequal rights. Henceforth, as Hollenbach contends, solidarity will rest in safeguarding “the inviolable rights of the human person,” including religious liberty, rather than in a stratified, organic order (Pacem in Terris, no. 60).

Now the very primacy accorded dignity-in-solidarity heralds a methodological shift from an act-centered teleology (one accepting slavery, the denial of religious liberty, and the “natural” subordination of women) to a rights-based deontology. And the methodological shift has normative consequences. Where appeal to the finality of the act, independent of circumstances and intention, allowed the magisterium to condemn “intrinsically evil” actions, such as artificial contraception or same-sex relations, intrinsic evil now signifies those actions or practices that by their nature violate basic human rights.

John Paul II accordingly re-interprets what Gaudium et spes described as “shameful” (proba), so that for the first time slavery is described as intrinsically evil. The criterion of judgment becomes “whatever is offensive to human dignity” (Veritatis Splendor, no. 80). For the “object” condemned—be it slavery, trafficking, degrading labor conditions—is no longer merely an act, considered apart from circumstances and intentions, but rather the fixing of action-descriptions precisely in terms of them. The “grammar” of rights implies that certain actions or practices are always impermissible just because of the circumstances and intentions, for example holding another as property. So described, no further appeal to circumstances or intentions is ever permissible. Such practices are intrinsically evil.

New wine is thus poured into new wineskins. Doctrine develops and, precisely so, preserves our “vital link with the Gospel of the Lord.” And as Hollenbach argues, such development is open-textured, resisting closure. The primacy of dignity and the modern, egalitarian rhetoric of rights allowed the Church to reweave the web of belief. As Newman foresaw, changed circumstances beget new interpretations, so that the recognition of religious liberty, the full moral equality of women, and the “intrinsic evil” of slavery do not so much strike a discordant note as resolve a prevailing disharmony. And further questions remain. For the new wine—dignity and human rights—is not readily poured in old wineskins, like the condemnation of contraception or same-sex relations on the basis of the sexual act. The hermeneutical shift, implicitly acknowledged by John Paul II in parsing “intrinsic evil” in terms of dignity and rights, raises these into question.

As John T. Noonan concludes is his A Church That Can and Cannot Change (2024), “The Church, in effect, although not always in words, acknowledges that it erred and moves on to the new doctrine. Doing so, it confronts change, acknowledges change, and affirms its own life and as a living and growing body.” Wisdom is perennial. But, as Hollenbach reminds us, we must become wise.