It is a great pleasure to participate in this seminar commemorating Pope Benedict XVI's April 2008 address to the United Nations, and to be sharing the podium with Ambassadors Terje Rød-Larsen and Hilario Davide.

As it happens, I had the good fortune to be present at the UN when the Holy Father delivered that speech, and to witness the enthusiastic standing ovation that it received in the packed hall of the General Assembly. I cannot help wondering, however, whether the others who applauded the Pope so enthusiastically that day had the same experience I had. It was not until much later, when I carefully read and studied the text, that I began to grasp the full implications of his words. For, as with many of Pope Benedict’s speeches, it is one where some rather complex ideas were expressed--one might almost say telegraphed--in a very condensed fashion. It is a speech that needs, as they say, to be “unpacked.”

So, as a contribution to that process, I would like to offer some reflections on how the Holy Father's remarks last year fit into the ongoing story of the Holy See's engagement with the post-World War II human rights project. That story begins back in the fall of 1948, when the General Assembly met in Paris to debate the final text of Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We now know, thanks to the memoirs of René Cassin, that he and the other proponents of the Declaration received considerable discreet assistance from Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, then the papal nuncio in Paris. When Cardinal Roncalli became Pope John XXIII, he not only praised the Declaration as an example of the far-sightedness of the UN, but to the surprise of many people, he began using the language of human rights as a way of communicating with "all men and women of good will"--men and women of all faiths and no faith.

At that time, and indeed throughout the Cold War years, such confidence in the importance of human rights was widely thought to be naïve. Political realists of the day scoffed at the idea that such notions could make a difference in world affairs. But Pope Paul VI continued in the same vein as his predecessor. And when John Paul II became Pope in 1978, he made respect for human dignity and human rights a more prominent theme than ever. It was, of course, during his pontificate that the international human rights movement—with the 1948 Declaration as its polestar—came into its own, and demonstrated its truly remarkable potential as a force for peaceful change, particularly in Eastern Europe and South Africa. In 1989, the so-called realists learned that ideals can be just as real as tanks and guns. The whole world was marveling that a few simple words of truth--a few courageous people willing to “call good and evil by name”--could change the course of history.

John Paul II was one of those people, as was Vaclav Havel. That year, 1989, Havel wrote with amazement, “I really do inhabit a world where words are capable of shaking the entire system of government, where words can be mightier than ten military divisions.”

Yet, in that very same year, when euphoria about human rights was at its height, John Paul II was already expressing some concerns. He pointed out that the Declaration, noble as it is, "does not contain the anthropological and moral bases for the human rights that it proclaims.” Havel, too, was becoming worried about what he called "the mysterious power of words"--the way they could be two-edged swords. “Words,” he wrote, “can be rays of light in a realm of darkness,” but they can also be “lethal arrows.” And sometimes the same words that once were rays of light can become lethal arrows.

By the time the Declaration's 50th anniversary arrived in 1998, John Paul II was warning that “two shadows” were hovering over the anniversary—in the form of attacks on “two essential characteristics of the very idea of human rights: their universality and their indivisibility”.

Against that background, there was much curiosity about what Pope Benedict would say when he addressed the UN in the year of the Declaration’s 60th anniversary. It is a sign of the progress made over the past 60 years that he could begin by taking as given a proposition that must have seemed like only a distant goal to John XXIII and to the men and women who had to work hard even to get human rights references included in the UN Charter. He noted that today, “Human rights are increasingly being presented as the common language and ethical substratum of international relations.” Then, like his predecessors, Pope Benedict praised the Universal Declaration, describing it as the outcome of a process designed “to place the human person at the heart of institutions, laws, and the workings of society.” (There we have in a nutshell the central theme of Holy See diplomacy: the focus on keeping the human person as the center of concern--informed by an understanding of personhood that is neither radically individualistic nor collectivist, an understanding that each person is uniquely valuable but constituted in important ways through his relationships with others.)

Now, against that background, what seems quite striking about Pope Benedict's discussion of human rights is that his expressions of appreciation were followed by what may well be the most sobering cautionary discussion about human rights that has ever appeared in any papal document. Pope Benedict’s short speech signals--briefly but clearly--no fewer than nine dilemmas that are clouding the future of the human rights project. They are the dilemmas posed by: (1) cultural relativism, (2) positivism, (3) philosophical relativism, (4) utilitarianism, (5) selective approaches to rights, (6) escalating demands for new rights, (7) hyper-individualistic interpretations of rights, (8) forgetfulness of the relation between rights and responsibilities, and (9) the threat posed to religious freedom by dogmatic forms of secularism.

These problems have hovered over the human rights project from the beginning, but they have become more acute as the project has advanced. In fact one might say they have been aggravated by the very success of human rights ideas. The more those ideas have shown their power, the more intense has become the struggle to capture that power for various ends, not all of which are respectful of human dignity.

Any one of the dilemmas mentioned by the Pope would deserve a more lengthy discussion that I can provide here today, so I will limit myself to some observations about those that pertain most closely to two essential features of fundamental human rights--two features that the UN has emphatically reaffirmed--their universality and their indivisibility.

Let's begin with threats to universality. One of the greatest achievements of the human rights project was precisely to lift up the proposition that certain rights are so fundamental that they belong to everyone simply by virtue of being a member of the human family. Pope Benedict paid tribute to that accomplishment when he credited the UDHR with having enabled “different cultures, juridical expressions and institutional models to converge around a fundamental nucleus of values and hence of rights.” But he is well aware that proposition is far from being universally accepted. Some people, he noted, deny it “in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks,” and others use “the argument of cultural specificity to mask violations of human rights.” Some of the world’s worst human rights violators have attempted to hide behind the argument that human rights are "western" inventions that do not apply to their local circumstances.

Those problems are well known. But they have been aggravated in recent years by the tendency of some international actors, often with good intentions, to assume that universality of human rights means that human rights have to be interpreted and implemented in the same way everywhere. In effect, that is to adopt a form of cultural imperialism that actually lends credibility to critiques based on cultural relativism!
That is why Pope John Paul II found it necessary on the Declaration's 50th anniversary to remind us of something that was taken for granted by the Declaration's framers, namely that universality does not entail homogeneity. The existence of different ways of implementing principles does not necessarily entail relativism about the principles themselves. In fact, the common understanding of core principles can be enriched by the accumulation of a variety of experiences in bringing those principles to life.

The point I wish to make here is simply that Pope Benedict’s warning about cultural relativism should not be understood as putting universal rights and cultural particularities into stark opposition. After all, rights emerge from culture; rights cannot be sustained without cultural underpinnings; and rights, to be effective, must become part of each people’s way of life.

To ignore that reality would be to fall into the mindset that, regrettably, characterizes the professional culture of many international lawyers, international civil servants, and international NGOs--a kind of international-ism that is insensitive to local particularities and that insists on its own dogmatic interpretations of human rights.

But how, you may be wondering, can one distinguish between the cultural relativism that undermines universality and a legitimate pluralism that permits different means of expressing and protecting fundamental rights?

That question brings us to a more recent, and perhaps more serious, threat to universality--the problem of philosophical relativism. In our post-modern world, it's no secret that understandings of rights, justice, and natural law are hotly contested. Relativistic attitudes have penetrated so deeply into popular culture that good men and women increasingly feel unable to say why any values should be defended or why any conduct should be condemned, except that it’s a matter of preference. The Nobel-prizewinning poet Czeslaw Milosz once gave voice to fears that have troubled many friends of human rights. He said, “I wonder about those beautiful and moving words which pertain to the old repertory of the rights of man and the dignity of the person. I wonder at this phenomenon because maybe underneath there is an abyss. After all, these ideas had their foundation in religion….How will they stay afloat if the bottom is taken out?”

Pope Benedict, of course, has argued vigorously that the bottom has not fallen out, and just as vigorously that human rights ideas can be defended on the basis of reason and experience. But that defense is far from simple, as he explained in the text of a lecture that he was to have given at La Sapienza University last spring. There, he posed a kind of challenge to the faculty of jurisprudence: “How can juridical norms can be found that guarantee freedom, human dignity and human rights? That is the question that occupies us today in the democratic processes of opinion formation, and that at the same time fills us with anxiety over the future of humanity.” Anticipating the standard response referring to democratic deliberation, he observed that public argumentation in contemporary democracies aims above all at attaining majorities, and that “sensitivity to the truth is constantly overruled by sensitivity to interests,” often by “special interests that do not truly serve everyone.”

Then, having uttered the word “truth”, he was faced with Pilate’s question: "What is truth?" The search for truth, he said, is “one that always demands strenuous new efforts, and that is never posed and resolved definitively.” It is a never-ending process of reflecting on experience, coming to judgments, and subjecting those judgments to continuing scrutiny in the light of reason and experience. Thus, he said, he could not offer a definitive answer, "but only an invitation to remain on the journey with the great ones who throughout history have struggled and sought with their responses and their restlessness for the truth which continually beckons from beyond any individual answer.”

For those who are dissatisfied with such an answer, I would refer to the Pope's spirited expression of faith in reason on a previous occasion where he said: “There are really only two options. Either one recognizes the priority of reason, of creative Reason that is at the beginning of all things and is the principle of all things…or [one accepts] the priority of the irrational”--which means accepting that everything on earth and in our lives, including reason itself, is only accidental. “The great option of Christianity,” he said, “is the option for rationality and the priority of reason.”

And that, I would suggest, is also the great option, the wager, if you like, taken by the founders of the UN and the men and women who drafted the Universal Declaration. If you recall the language of the UN charter, you recall that it speaks of "faith": "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, and in the equal rights of men and women."

So one might say that both the UN and the Holy See have staked a great deal on faith and reason; both rely on the human capacity to reflect on and learn from experience. A longstanding Catholic tradition holds that human rights arise from a natural order whose laws can be discovered through study and experience--by believer and unbeliever alike. Pope Benedict is well aware that not everyone shares that conviction. But it is hard to dispute his conclusion that to remove human rights from that context would destroy their universality. If there are no common truths to which people of different backgrounds and cultures can appeal, it is difficult to see how universal rights can be upheld.

Now I would like to turn briefly to just one other problem cited by the Pope: the increasing threat to the interdependence and indivisibility of human rights. The drafters of the UDHR went to great pains to construct it as a unified, integrated document, whose parts are mutually conditioning. But the Cold War antagonists insisted for over forty years on driving a wedge between the political and civil rights and the social and economic rights. By the end of the Cold War, nearly everyone was treating the Declaration as a mere list from which one can pick and choose one's favorites, like items on a menu.
Nearly everyone, that is, except the UN and the Holy See. The Holy See has never wavered in its support of the Universal Declaration as an integrated whole. Throughout the Cold War, it insisted as it does today on the interdependence of political and civil rights with the social and economic rights (while recognizing that the UDHR, Article 22, allows more diversity in modes of implementation of the latter than the former). And now that the provisions protecting marriage, the family, parental rights, and religious freedom are under mounting assault, Pope Benedict took the occasion of his UN speech to insist again on the Declaration's unity, warning that it “cannot be applied piecemeal, according to trends or selective choices.”

A development that aggravates the problem of selectivity today is the pressure to expand the category of rights that are so fundamental as to be deemed universal. On the one hand, as the Pope recognized, that category cannot be closed, for “new situations arise as history proceeds.” On the other hand, the more goods or desires that are recognized as rights, the more risk there is of trivializing core human values--and the more occasions for conflict among rights.

Those problems, like so many others, are concomitants of success. Now that the UDHR has become the single most common reference point for cross-national discussions of human freedom and dignity, interest groups of all sorts have intensified their efforts to have their agenda items recognized as universal rights. There is thus a risk that universal human rights could dissolve into scattered rights of personal autonomy, undermining the conditions for protecting authentic freedom, equality, and dignity.

No wonder, then, that the Pope felt moved to warn against pressures to “move away from the protection of human dignity towards the satisfaction of simple interests.” And no wonder that he called for great “discernment” in distinguishing proposals that represent healthy developments from those that are harmful to human dignity.

There is much more to be said on all of these subjects, but let me conclude by summing up what I believe to be the general trajectory thus far of the Holy See's engagement with the modern human rights project. When the project was young, feeble, and in need of nurture, the Holy See in the persons of John XXIII and Paul VI offered encouragement and a helping hand. They even adopted the language of human rights in their own writings. Forty years later, in the era of great human rights triumphs, John Paul II maintained and amplified that support, but--like a true friend who tells you what you need to hear--he warned us not to get too confident. Now that the very success of human rights has made them prime targets for manipulation and deconstruction, Pope Benedict has continued in the highest form of friendship--wholeheartedly affirming the vision of human freedom and dignity while vigorously warning against developments that are undermining that vision.

The speech that he gave last April was a challenge to all of us who share that vision. I think he hoped to inspire each of us to consider the ways in which our decisions and actions in the areas where we live and work can help to shift probabilities either for or against a social order respectful of the dignity and rights of the person. “Every generation,” as he wrote in Spe Salvi, “has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs.” In our increasingly interdependent, yet conflict- ridden, world, that remains just as much of a challenge for us as it was for those far-sighted men and women who--against all odds--launched the human rights initiative in the years after World War II.