The term human rights is contemporary idiom for natural rights and, as such, is intimately joined to the concept of natural law, shared by Western secular and religious tradition alike.1 For Christianity, natural law is God’s law; one of its pillars is that people are made in the image of God, therefore violation of human rights and dignity is also an attack on God.2 Notwithstanding such
... [Show full abstract] fundamentals, however, the Catholic Church was slow to adopt the cause of human rights as its own, largely as a result of the close association of the notion with secularising Liberalism.3 Indeed, the first real landmark for the Church’s adoption of the cause did not come until John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris of 1963. Although the primary focus of the encyclical, written in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, is world peace, it opens with the first important statements made by any pope on the subject of human rights – including, significantly, socio-economic rights – and assumes the Universal Declaration of 1948 as part of the magisterium of the Church4