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Rights and social justice in Australia
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| By MICHAEL COSTIGAN
16 March, 2008 |
LIFE TO THE FULL:
Rights and Social Justice in Australia
Edited by James Franklin
Connor Court Publishing Pty Ltd, PO Box 1, Ballan, Vic 3342.
Telephone: (03) 5368 2570. Email: anthony@connorcourt.com
2007; pb, 140pp; $29.95.
Reviewed by MICHAEL COSTIGAN
Few subjects are more timely for believers today than the Church’s attitude to human rights and social justice, the theme of this collection of 18 short essays, most by Australian Catholics.
As Archbishop Philip Wilson writes in his Foreword, ‘a commitment to justice is required of all Catholics’.
It was the idea of the enterprising publisher, Anthony Cappello of Connor Court Publishing, to use each of the 18 human rights listed 60 years ago by Church leaders in the USA as the starting point for the contributions.
This was a challenge, since it meant that the invited writers needed to establish the relevance now of the concepts and priorities articulated two or three generations ago in a distant land and in a very different world from today’s.
To their credit they have well handled this task of adaptation.
Most of the authors have an academic background, while several work full-time for the Church nationally or at diocesan level.
Commentaries on industrial and workplace matters are supplied by two trade unionists and the member of a professional association.
The editor of the collection, associate professor James Franklin of the University of NSW, is well known from previous writings, most notably in recent times his thought-provoking Catholic Values and Australian Realities.
Among the acute remarks made by Franklin in his Introduction to Life to the Full (he has also written the important opening essay, on the Right to Life) is that the Catholic Church has been outstanding as ‘one major institution defending the objectivity of rights’.
This should be remembered at a time when many people talking about rights under the influence of relativism do so subjectively.
Franklin makes balanced and fair distinctions, for example between ‘markets that violate rights’ and ethically structured markets; and between ‘the regulated and generally stable capitalism of the last few decades’ and ‘the unrestrained capitalism of the Depression’.
Long books developing these themes have been or could still be written.
Other writers offer valuable and succinct reflections on some of Catholic Social Teaching’s key concepts.
A few of many examples are: Fr Andrew Hamilton, SJ, on solidarity and participation; Catherine Althaus on subsidiarity; Michael Casey on freedom; Marita Winters on the centrality of family; Brian Coman on the universal destination of created goods; and Michael Hogan on the rights of association and peaceful assembly.
Most of the authors make good use of source documents, with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) properly given much prominence.
The words of Pope John Paul II and the Second Vatican Council are also cited effectively throughout the book.
I would like to have seen more attention given to the papal documents which established human rights at the heart of the Church’s social teaching: Pope John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris, as well as Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio.
More use could also have been made of Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II’s epoch-making Declaration of Human Freedom.
It was in the era of these documents, coinciding with the rising popularity of ecumenism, that the old Catholic saying that ‘error has no rights’ was finally abandoned.
The absence of any reference in the book to the Australian Bishops’ 1998 pastoral letter marking the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is surprising.
Well received by the Holy See, it was published in full in both the English and Italian editions of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
There was a time when most Catholics considered that only living persons, always including those in the womb, could accurately be said to have rights.
Under the influence of environmentalists, we now hear much talk about the rights of future generations.
The idea deserves consideration.
Do the dead also retain any rights, for example to their good name?
Defamation laws rarely acknowledge such a concept.
Then there are the defenders of the ‘rights’ of animals and even of plants and trees.
Is this simply a case of making worth-while points about our obligations rather than the ‘legal rights’ of other created entities?
Another issue that refuses to go away is that of the desirability or otherwise of a Bill of Rights.
Interesting arguments have been raised on both sides but there was little space in this book to explore that debate.
In the material served up to us by James Franklin and his team, however, there is ample scope for continuing reflection and discussion about rights and social justice.
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