Political philosopher Pierre Manent’s shows how the worldly conceptions of "rights" and "human dignity" differ from classical and Christian anthropology. Manent argues that these concepts apparently pushed by the humanitarianism of Francis and Leo sever us from the common good societies which should ultimately be directed to loving God above all things and working for the salvation of ourselves and others.
Pope Leo appoints German bishop who endorsed homosexual ‘blessings,’ claimed sodomy ‘not sinful’
Pope Leo XIV presides over the Prayer Vigil for Peace at St Peter's Basilica, on April 11, 2026 in Vatican City, Vatican..
[https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pope-leo-appoints-german-bishop-who-endorsed-homosexual-blessings-claimed-sodomy-not-sinful/?utm_source=featured-news]
Pope Leo XIV... appears to have adopted “humanitarianism” as his default position. - Daniel Mahoney
Political philosopher Pierre Manent’s shows how the worldly conceptions of "rights" and "human dignity" differ from classical and Christian anthropology. Manent argues that these concepts apparently pushed by the humanitarianism of Francis and Leo sever us from the common good 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 themselves and ideological abstractions of universal "rights".
For the Hobbesian/Lockean individual "rights" and "human dignity" are artificially constructed to protect pre-existing subjective rights and self-interest. The individual is defined by what they possess (life, liberty, property) rather than by what they owe to their community or to God.
While the Kantian view grounds "rights" and "human dignity" in autonomous individuality, severing the individual from transcendent authority of God, natural law and the Christian classical teleology is rooted in virtue and Charity that aims us towards God.
Imago Dei or man as the image of God is rooted in human beings being moral agents endowed with free will and intellect with a spiritual destiny beyond United Nation secular utopias centered mainly in this life.
Created out of thin air modern "rights" divorce us from this God's created order, our obligations to each other in the family and society because they are abstract thoughts mixed with manufactured emotions and sentiment rather than a coherent real common good down to earth relationships within families and communities.
Humanitarianism sees individuals as isolated entities rather than Thomistic and Aristotelian "political animals" deeply connected to their families, communities and countries.
The pushers of rights language seem to see "human dignity" as self-relation with the self according to Manent because they removed God and traditional teleology - the ultimate purpose or goal of human life - from family, community and politics.
"Human dignity" ceased to be about fulfilling one's obligations to God and His created order (reality) or to family as well as community. The right to the pursuit of happiness becomes a closed-loop "self-relation" to the individual's concupiscence (their sinful fallen nature desires). That's why it appears the Francis and Leo Vatican seem obsessed with blessing individuals who defined by their individual identity with sinful desires and the right to self-preservation in their sin. Manet explains:
[N]ew order... deduce all of society’s rules from the individual’s relation to himself. This self-relation refuses the introduction of any human law that might inform, regulate, or elevate it. Because the individual alone possesses the authority of nature, it is the sovereign self who rules over the law...
... This view is the source of the 2013 French law that made marriage available to same-sex couples... Those dismissed as “conservatives” are told: if you want to base the law on a natural tendency, you cannot exclude same-sex couples from the benefit of the same law. Once again, the argument is based exclusively on the natural inclinations of individuals as individuals...
... If society is not natural, then its conservation or reproduction cannot by themselves justify or motivate the foundational law of human communities. In sum, for us, the common good does not exist in such a way as to justify the law’s positive concern for its preservation or continuation. Only the individual’s self-preservation (or his “will” or “autonomy”) can be the source of what is right by law because only the bare individual is truly natural. [https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/why-natural-law/]
Moreover, the problem with "State of Nature" ideologues like Kant, Hobbes and Locke along with their humanitarian followers is that they imagine a state of nature where humans are absolutely free but possessing "rights" with no natural obligations to one another other, to communities and the the countries they illegally enter. Again, Manet explains:
[W]e have been led to see migratory movements as the most significant phenomenon of the present world... They represent the movement from the particular to the general, or to the “universal,” as we now prefer to say... migrations are thought to be the carriers of the new justice, and migrants, as a distinct human group, symbolize in our eyes the union of force and justice, a privilege that had always been reserved to self-governing peoples organized politically into communities of citizens.
The phenomenon that I have just briefly described makes no sense unless it is linked with the idea that is the leitmotif of my argument, the idea of justice that sees its principle entirely in the self-relation of the individual human being... since it is no longer either tempered or counterbalanced by any principle of association, or any articulation of the civic common good. If there is no justice but that of the general, of humanity in general, that is, of the individual set in his unassailable self-relation, then the individual who presents himself at the border, or who crosses the border, in the name of his humanity understood as indistinguishable from that of any other, and who thus represents all of humanity—this individual is the carrier of a right that can prevail in opposition to the will of any political body.
The political body then appears as a mere particular association, one ultimately lacking moral legitimacy. The puny individual, who in many cases has already crossed so many borders, is seen to represent humanity in toto, while the political body, within the borders it claims to defend, is only a circumscription of humanity, a fraction that separates itself—particularly if it refuses access to the human being who presents himself in the name of human rights.
It is not too difficult to understand the logic of the argument, or how it is that the legitimacy of the general has moved from the democratic political body—from the general will or the common good—to the individual qua individual, as simply a member of humanity in general... the representative regime in the framework of the nation—and which had derived such pride from this effort—emptied themselves so abruptly of their sense of self and their confidence in their legitimate rights, to the point of seeing in the self-regard of the political community a kind of crime against humanity. [https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/why-natural-law/]
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