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By Mélinée Le Priol | France
Human rights no longer attract as much enthusiasm from Catholics, particularly young people, as during the last century.
When Brigitte Vilanova, an activist and vice-president of ACAT (Christian Action for the Abolition of Torture), visits Christian communities, she sometimes experiences a scornful attitude.
"Oh, so you're a human rights defender!" she often hears from Christians, most of whom have little desire to correspond with a death row prisoner on the other side of the world.
"Some people fail to see human rights as a form of humanism but view them as a threat to their Christian identity," laments Vilanova, an Orthodox Christian and teacher, who claims that this rejection has grown in the wake of recent Islamist attacks.
"Our battle is not popular at the moment," she admits, noting that ACAT had 14,000 members when she joined in 1976 but now has only half that number, most of whom are retired.
Many young Catholics see these historical groups as legitimate but far removed from their own preoccupations.
"We get the impression that the language they use has not changed since the 1980s," says Paul Piccarreta, 29, director of Limite magazine.
"I agree on the fundamentals but I think that this kind of involvement lacks radicalness. It's a bit lukewarm."
Could it be that these groups have difficulty in recruiting because their battle has already been won?
"Opposition to torture is no longer a matter of debate here in France," observes Gregor Puppinck, director of the European Centre for Law and Justice, which has just published a book critical of human rights.
Puppinck believes that young Catholics are also reacting against their elders by becoming involved in less "consensual" ideological fields of social action, including the defense of life and the family, for example.
While international solidarity is quite probably less of a priority for Catholics today, many now also seem to prefer to speak of "Christian rights" rather than human rights.
"We have difficulty in raising awareness of Palestinian issues among parish communities; people more easily support movements that explicitly help Christians," says Monique Boulanger.
Boulanger's ecumenical group, Friends of Sabeel-France, is currently organizing a weekly "prayer wave" for an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
This lack of interest no doubt forms part of a broader sense of disaffection.
"During the 1980s, human rights were still viewed as desirable but this changed at the beginning of the 21st century," explains philosopher Denis Moreau. "Liberalism led to disillusionment and the ideological apparatus that accompanied it also collapsed."
Piccarreta notes that "when the USA attacks certain countries, it bases itself on human rights."
While human rights were meant to create common ground, in reality they tended to fragment society by creating minorities who can lay claim to their own rights, Piccarreta believes.
Catholic mistrust of an exalted notion of individual freedom appears to have its roots in the distant past.
"Human rights lay claim to being based on a moral magisterium, which, like that of the Church, is said to be universal," adds Puppinck. "That necessarily creates a tension between the two."
Puppinck, who is also a 44-year-old Catholic activist highly involved in combating abortion, believes that human rights offer little in the face of the "new threats" that the world is facing.
Protection of human rights seems not only powerless and inappropriate but even "complicit" in the face of issues such as world governance, large-scale migration and transhumanism, he warns.
Although some Catholics believe this mistrust of human rights is a consequence of the current economic and security situation, others argue that there has simply been a change in people's manner of engagement.
The activist groups and trade unions of the 1970s and 1980s have thus been replaced by involvement in less politically engaged NGOs such as FIDESCO, Point-Coeur or Le Rocher.
"Believers have not become brutes overnight," says Piccarreta. "Human dignity is still of great interest to them."
This continues to motivate the commitment to the poor and migrants of many Christians of every generation.
In this sense, they continue to defend human rights without necessarily relying on a term that many now regard as too political.
The French Pax Christi movement and other Catholic organizations are hosting a conference on Dec. 15 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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