Jacques Maritain, Christian Democracy and the Growth of Human Rights

The paradoxical arrival of a Christian and Catholic rights based tradition in the early 20th century problemitises histories of international law and human rights. An historical presentation of the emergence of international law tends to move progressively from Grotius and the Enlightenment period of natural rights, toward the 19th century’s classical formulations of international law. The writing of Jacques Maritain is central to this enquiry because of his pivotal role as intermediary between Catholicism’s political, legal and theological thought and the modern legal and democratic project that emerged in Europe, which shaped human rights discourse. Similarly, the development and role of Christian democracy in shaping European sensibilities and ideas about the future of Western democratic project is reconsidered as a consequence of this turn. An outcome of this enquiry is to recognise, as the international jurist Koskenniemi has shown, that international law did not completely exclude the idea of natural law, even as jurists emphasised legal positivism in the 19th century. If natural law waned in influence, though it was disseminated partially by the thought of Grotius and Vattel, natural law theory nevertheless had potential to arise in a new context. A return of natural law thought during the development of human rights ideas int the early 20th century would seem to abandon ‘the liberal distinctions between morality/law, or imperfect/perfect rights, and reopening the early faith/sin debate which it was the purpose of the classical [legal] discourse to close’. However, that debate did reopen with the construction of an argument for human dignity and human rights at the start of the 20th century originating by-in-large in Catholic political thought. Catholic jurists and philosophers, particularly that of Maritain, regained access to the development of international law, not to restore the faith/sin distinction as suggested by Koskenniemi but to resolve the problem of the political form of the state initially in post-war Europe, leaning on an extended western legal tradition rooted in Christian thought. Catholic theorists recognise a prisca theologia or a semblance of the natural law, and thereby advanced a theory about the way and the expression of the political form the state takes as a basis for a common political humanism. Maritain proposed a model of Church and state, and delineates his principal contribution as a theory of a “secular democratic faith”, to bridge Catholicism with liberal democracy and human rights. However, for the Catholic Church this conduit required a culture open to the idea of religion, and built upon a common idea of human dignity, and human rights. This article concludes by enquiring if a “secular democratic faith” as the basis of democracy and human rights is possible today.