Pope Leo XIV... appears to have adopted “humanitarianism” as his default position. - Daniel Mahoney Political philosopher Pierre Manent’s shows how the humanitarianism of Francis and Leo sever us from the common good of families and societies which should ultimately be directed to loving God above all things and working for the salvation of ourselves and others. Manet's books have argued that Francis's focus on universal borderless rights threatens to replace authentic Christian faith with a abstract secular humanitarianism. He contents that Francis's interpretation of the Good Samaritan in Fratelli Tutt is a quasi-humanitarian secular parable, whereas the Samaritan fundamentally represents Jesus Christ healing a mortally wounded humanity. Sadly, abstract 'Human dignity" humanitarianism replaces acting moral people choosing the good with abstract, disembodied individuals choosing subjective desires unrelated to anything, but t...
Thomas Fleming's book, The Normality of Everyday Life, claims that the theory of rights is a superstition. Fleming says, "Ask where rights come from, they will either refer to a mystical story such as the wondrous tale of the social contract, or following Calvin, they will dismiss all criticism by saying that everybody knows what rights are." He says that if there is a convincing proof of the existence origin of rights that he had never heard of it, that rights one must conclude are to be taken on faith, and only by those who profess to have no religion. The book says that there are two American spokesmen for rights: Thomas Paine versus Thomas Jefferson. The educated Jefferson traced the theory of natural rights through the struggle between a king and a parliament, and to the Magna Carta, and ultimately to the Anglo-Saxons who lived in freedom before the Norman Conquest. Whereas with the uneducated Thomas Paine, thought that we were free and invented imaginary societies ...