FM vs. ChatGPT: Rist gives you the historical alarm: Leo XIII represented a significant development in Catholic political vocabulary by making rights much more central. Fortin gives you the philosophical alarm: The danger is that the rights framework can alter the underlying conception of political morality by shifting attention from virtue, justice, and the common good toward individual claims. Villey goes still deeper: The modern subjective “right” may itself be a corruption of the classical meaning of ius. Kraynak then asks whether modern natural-rights language can really be identified with the older Christian tradition merely because Christians supplied some of its historical ingredients. And Manent asks what happens to political community when the individual is conceived primarily as the bearer of rights. So the four critiques converge without being identical. The strongest Fortin-style formulation I would revise my earlier defense of Leo to this: Leo XIII did not simply abandon the classical Catholic understanding of law, virtue, justice, and the common good. His rights language remained substantially subordinated to natural and divine law. But that does not establish that his increasing reliance upon rights represented no conceptual development. Fortin would press the more fundamental question: whether importing rights as a primary category into Catholic political discourse risks shifting the center of gravity from objective justice and human perfection toward individual claims. The historical significance of Leo's language therefore cannot be dismissed merely by pointing out that he continued to affirm duties and natural law.
Yes—but I would sharpen the thesis considerably. The strongest version is not “Leo XIII invented modern rights, therefore Leo XIII caused Francis,” but rather:
Leo XIII represents an important development in Catholic social vocabulary in which “rights” became a prominent way of expressing claims grounded in natural law. The theological question is whether that vocabulary remained subordinated to objective law, virtue, duties, the common good, and humanity’s ultimate end—or whether later Catholic discourse could detach “rights” from those foundations and turn them into autonomous claims of individual entitlement.
That distinction matters enormously.
1. Leo XIII himself does not appear to make the separation you are worried about
When you actually read Leo's Rerum Novarum, his use of “rights” is remarkably embedded in duties, natural law, divine law, justice, family, religion, and charity.
For example, immediately after discussing the rights of workers and employers, Leo discusses their corresponding duties. Workers must perform their work faithfully and avoid violence; employers must respect workers as persons and keep their spiritual good in view.
Even more importantly, Leo explicitly says that the Church's social program aims at forming people to:
“act from a motive of duty”
and to
“love God and their fellow men”
and thereby advance in virtue.
So Leo's conceptual structure is not:
individual → right → claim against others
but much more like:
God / eternal law → natural law → objective human good → justice and duties → rights corresponding to that order.
That is quite different from modern rights discourse.
2. Your concern becomes much more interesting with Libertas
Libertas actually gives you some of the strongest evidence for this distinction.
Leo says that law consists in both “obligations” and “rights,” but immediately grounds both in eternal law and God as Creator and Lawgiver.
He then explicitly rejects the idea that human beings possess an unlimited right to determine truth and morality for themselves. He argues that once human reason becomes its own supreme legislator, the distinction between good and evil is endangered.
And Leo goes even further: he denies that freedom of thought, speech, writing, or worship can simply be treated as unconditional natural rights.
That is very significant for your argument.
It means that Leo's “rights” are not yet the modern liberal conception of rights in which the individual possesses a sphere of autonomous choice that stands prior to objective moral truth.
3. This is where Rist's criticism becomes interesting
If your quotation from Rist is accurate, his point is historically important even if one ultimately disagrees with his assessment.
The question isn't simply:
“Did Leo XIII use the word rights?”
Obviously he did.
The deeper question is:
What conceptual work does the category of “rights” perform when it becomes increasingly central to Catholic social thought?
That is a much more sophisticated question.
The older Thomistic vocabulary tends to begin with the good, virtue, justice, law, obligation, and the common good.
A rights-centered vocabulary tends to begin with:
“What is owed to this person?”
That isn't necessarily wrong. Indeed, ius itself is an ancient juridical concept, and justice necessarily involves rendering each person his due.
But there is a potential danger if the order is reversed.
Classical order
objective good → virtue → justice → duty → right
versus the possible modern distortion:
subjective right → entitlement → demand upon society → corresponding duty imposed upon others.
That second structure is much closer to the phenomenon Glendon criticized.
4. Glendon's criticism is therefore relevant—but shouldn't be projected backward onto Leo
Mary Ann Glendon's Rights Talk is useful precisely because it identifies a later development: political discourse can become dominated by an expanding catalogue of individual rights while losing the vocabulary of responsibility, sociality, duty, and moral norms.
That criticism does not, however, establish that Leo XIII himself made that mistake.
In fact, Rerum Novarum gives considerable evidence against that interpretation.
Leo repeatedly joins the two:
rights and duties.
His very section heading is:
“Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.”
And he says that the Gospel supplies society with a “scheme of duties and of rights.”
So the historical trajectory could instead be formulated:
Leo XIII → rights integrated into natural law and duty
↓
later developments → increasing emphasis on rights
↓
modern rights discourse → rights increasingly detached from objective moral anthropology
That is a defensible historical hypothesis.
It is much harder to defend:
Leo XIII → modern rights ideology → Vatican II → Francis
as a straightforward causal chain.
5. Your Las Casas/Rist comparison raises an even deeper philosophical issue
Your quotation from Rist concerning Las Casas is particularly interesting:
Las Casas “made rights a matter of justice.”
If Rist's characterization is correct, the important question is why that conceptual move matters.
You are noticing a possible tension between:
Augustinian/Thomistic moral language
and
juridical rights language.
But I would be cautious about saying that the older tradition regarded all virtues simply as “modes of love” and therefore rights are necessarily outside charity.
That would be too strong.
In Aquinas, for example, justice and charity are distinct virtues. Charity orders man to God and neighbor in friendship with God; justice gives each person his due. They are not interchangeable.
But charity can perfect and order justice.
That distinction actually helps your argument.
A Catholic account can say:
Justice tells me what is due to another; charity tells me why I should love the other and ultimately directs both of us toward God.
Consequently, rights are not necessarily an alternative to charity.
The danger occurs when:
the juridical claim becomes conceptually self-sufficient and no longer derives its meaning from objective human nature, justice, virtue, divine law, and the common good.
That is the much stronger criticism.
6. And this gives you an important way to understand the Francis question
This is where I think your proposed connection becomes most fruitful.
Consider two very different meanings of “rights.”
Leo XIII's framework
A human right is something grounded in:
- human nature
- natural law
- divine law
- justice
- the common good
- the family
- man's duties
- man's ultimate supernatural end
Thus rights are limited by the order of reality.
Leo even says in Rerum Novarum that a person cannot legitimately dispose of himself in a way contrary to the purpose of his existence; he explicitly places “the rights of God” above merely human claims.
Modern rights framework
The danger is that “right” becomes increasingly equivalent to:
a claim that an individual may make against society simply because he autonomously chooses something.
At that point, the hierarchy can become:
autonomous individual → right → state obligation
rather than:
God → objective moral order → human nature → common good → justice → rights and duties.
That is precisely where the modern rights critique becomes relevant to your concern about contemporary Catholic discourse.
7. But there is a major chronological problem with blaming Leo for Vatican II
I would resist saying that Leo XIII's rights language “caused” Vatican II's ambiguity.
The history is much more complicated.
In fact, there is an important irony:
Leo's Libertas explicitly rejects the proposition that religious freedom is an unconditional natural right.
Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae, by contrast, speaks of a right to religious freedom grounded in human dignity.
So if you are investigating a possible conceptual development, that is a much better place to concentrate:
How did Catholic teaching move from Leo's highly qualified conception of liberty and rights to the conciliar formulation of a juridical right to religious freedom?
That is an actual historical and theological question.
It is considerably more precise than saying that Leo simply introduced modern liberal rights into Catholicism.
8. The Greaney/Brohawn quotation is also important—but for a different reason
Their observation about people confusing a recommended social program with mandatory social doctrine points toward another problem: Catholic social teaching contains different levels of authority.
That distinction is essential.
Leo XIII can formulate principles concerning:
- natural law,
- private property,
- family,
- authority,
- justice,
- duties,
- worker associations,
while particular policy prescriptions or prudential applications can remain historically contingent.
That does not mean the underlying moral principles are optional.
And this connects strongly with the distinction you have been making in your Francis research:
One must distinguish a change in prudential application from a contradiction of a principle presented as grounded in divine law.
That is a much more rigorous method than simply saying “Leo was traditional” and “Francis is liberal.”
9. I would therefore formulate your thesis this way
I think your argument becomes considerably stronger if you put it in this form:
The difficulty with modern rights language is not the mere use of the juridical concept of a right. Catholic tradition itself recognizes rights as matters of justice. The difficulty arises when rights cease to be understood as juridical expressions of an objective moral order and instead become autonomous claims of individual choice. Leo XIII did not simply adopt that modern conception: his use of rights remained explicitly subordinate to eternal law, natural law, divine law, duties, virtue, religion, family, and the common good. Nevertheless, Leo's increasingly prominent rights vocabulary represents a significant development in Catholic social discourse, and it raises the historical question of whether later Catholic thought sufficiently preserved the older hierarchy between objective good, virtue, duty, justice, and rights.
That formulation avoids an important historical weakness while preserving the central insight you're pursuing.
And it gives you a very interesting bridge to Francis:
The real issue is not “rights versus tradition.” It is whether the concept of rights remains subordinate to an objective conception of human nature, divine law, virtue, and the common good—or whether rights become the primary language through which moral claims are constructed.
That is a substantially stronger philosophical critique than simply arguing that “rights language is liberal.”
Yes. That is an important qualification to what I said about Tierney. After looking at Kraynak's Catholicism and the Declaration of Independence alongside Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, I would not have characterized Tierney's thesis as simply an established correction to Villey. Kraynak directly challenges the stronger version of Tierney's genealogy.
Kraynak's argument against Tierney
Kraynak explicitly identifies Tierney's claim:
natural rights emerged from the medieval canon-law notion of “subjective right.”
He then treats that as one of the major claims that has to be examined rather than simply accepted.
His argument is particularly important because he distinguishes three questions that are often collapsed:
- Did medieval canonists use something like subjective rights?
- Does Christian teaching about the imago Dei imply natural rights?
- Is that Catholic conception actually the same thing as the “God-given rights” proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence?
Kraynak says these questions must be separated.
That is a significant challenge to the kind of genealogy I gave you earlier.
The key Kraynak point
Kraynak's deeper argument is that the modern doctrine of human rights cannot simply be read backward into medieval Christianity because medieval Christians possessed concepts that can be translated as “rights.”
That's exactly where he converges with Villey.
He is not necessarily denying that medieval canonists had juridical concepts resembling subjective rights. Rather, he denies that this establishes identity between medieval Catholic thought and modern natural-rights ideology.
And in Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, he goes further: he argues that Christianity's modern embrace of democracy and human rights involved a substantial historical development, with Kantian ideas playing a particularly important role.
Kraynak describes a modern argument roughly as:
Christian universal charity
→ respect for the dignity of every rational person
→ universal human rights
→ liberal democracy.
His objection is that this chain is not simply the historic Christian teaching translated into modern political language. It involves a significant philosophical transformation.
This changes how I should have described Villey
I previously said:
“Villey's historical thesis is contested; Tierney argues that canon law already contained subjective rights.”
That's true as a description of the scholarly dispute, but it was too easy to leave the impression that Tierney therefore defeats Villey's larger argument.
Kraynak gives us a much better distinction:
Tierney's argument
There are important medieval precedents for subjective rights.
Villey's argument
Modernity transformed ius into a fundamentally subjective juridical power, displacing the older conception of ius as the just thing.
Kraynak's argument
Even if Tierney establishes medieval antecedents, that does not demonstrate continuity between medieval Catholic juridical concepts and modern liberal natural-rights ideology.
That's a very important distinction.
And this strengthens your original Leo XIII question
Because now we can formulate the historical problem more carefully.
The question isn't:
“Did subjective rights exist before Leo XIII?”
Tierney gives substantial evidence that concepts resembling them did.
The much more interesting question is:
“What happened when the Catholic Church increasingly adopted modern natural-rights language as a principal way of presenting its social and political teaching?”
Kraynak's answer would emphasize transformation, not simply vocabulary.
And that makes Leo XIII extremely interesting.
Leo can simultaneously be:
- thoroughly committed to God,
- natural law,
- objective moral truth,
- duties,
- virtue,
- the common good,
and yet participate in a historical development toward a modern rights-centered political vocabulary.
Those propositions aren't contradictory.
Kraynak also gives you a powerful criticism of my earlier defense of Leo
I said:
Leo's rights language is safe because he grounds rights in natural law.
Kraynak would probably say:
That establishes Leo's intentions and theological premises, but it does not settle the historical effect or conceptual trajectory of the rights language.
That's the crucial correction.
His own book says that Christianity underwent a historical “opening” to democracy and human rights, and he attributes this development to multiple factors—including the Reformation, neo-Scholastic theories of popular sovereignty, Enlightenment rationalism, struggles against oppression, twentieth-century totalitarianism, and especially a particular modern philosophical influence.
So Kraynak's story is not:
Leo XIII invented liberalism.
Nor is it:
Medieval Catholics already had modern human rights, so modern rights are simply Catholic.
It is closer to:
Christianity had to undergo a substantial historical transformation before it could embrace modern democracy and human rights as it eventually did.
And this is where Kraynak is especially useful against a simplistic Tierney reading
Suppose Tierney demonstrates:
“Here is a medieval canonist who speaks of a person's ius.”
Kraynak can respond:
“Fine—but what conception of man, justice, political authority, and the good is operating there?”
That's the question.
Because two thinkers can use language that translates into English as “right” while possessing radically different anthropologies.
For example:
Medieval Christian framework
God
↓
creation
↓
natural law
↓
human nature
↓
justice
↓
ius
versus a modern liberal framework:
individual
↓
autonomy
↓
dignity
↓
right
↓
claim against society/state
The fact that both contain the word right doesn't establish continuity.
That's precisely the distinction I should have made more clearly.
And Kraynak's Declaration of Independence essay is particularly relevant
His conclusion is not simply “the Declaration is anti-Catholic.”
Rather, he argues that the American founding has six sources, not natural-rights theory alone, and that this broader account of the founding is actually closer to Catholic natural law than the Declaration's natural-rights language by itself.
That is a fascinating point for your project because it means Kraynak isn't merely attacking rights from the outside.
He's asking whether the political order can preserve Christian moral substance without reducing that substance to the language of individual rights.
And that's very close to your Glendon concern about the disappearance of duties, responsibilities, sociality, and objective moral norms.
So I'd revise my earlier answer this way:
Tierney is an important challenge to Villey's historical genealogy, but Tierney's evidence does not by itself establish that modern natural-rights theory is simply the organic continuation of medieval Catholic thought. Kraynak's work shows why the philosophical content and historical function of “rights” have to be distinguished from the mere existence of medieval subjective-right language.
That makes Kraynak + Villey + Rist a much more interesting combination for your Leo XIII question than my earlier answer suggested.
Yes—if you're referring to Kraynak's reading of the American founding/Catholic tradition, that's an important distinction I missed. He distinguishes the older language of “rights” as grants or duties from the modern conception of rights as autonomous individual claims.
The distinction can be put this way:
- Traditional/right-as-duty or grant: a right is connected to an ordered moral and political authority—something granted, recognized, or owed within an objective order, with corresponding duties.
- Modern natural right: the individual is conceived as possessing a right prior to and independent of political society, which can then be asserted against other people or the state.
That distinction changes the argument about Tierney substantially.
Kraynak's point is not necessarily that medieval Christians never used ius in a subjective sense. His stronger point is that the meaning and political function of “rights” in the modern natural-rights tradition cannot simply be inferred from medieval uses of the word.
And this directly supports your original concern about Leo XIII.
The crucial question becomes
Not:
“Did Leo XIII believe in rights?”
Obviously yes.
But:
“What kind of rights did Leo XIII mean?”
If Leo means rights as claims grounded in an objective order of justice, natural law, duties, and ultimately God, then his language is substantially different from the modern proposition:
“I possess this right simply as an autonomous individual, and society exists partly to secure my exercise of it.”
That's exactly the distinction that makes Kraynak's argument important.
It also explains why “rights + duties” isn't by itself sufficient to defend Leo from the criticism. We have to determine what rights and duties mean within Leo's whole anthropology and political theology.
And it gives you a very strong way to connect Kraynak with Villey:
Villey: the classical ius is fundamentally the just thing owed in an objective order, rather than an autonomous subjective power.
Kraynak: don't assume that the modern American language of “natural rights” is simply the continuation of medieval Catholic ius; the modern conception has a different philosophical and political structure.
Rist: Leo XIII's prominent use of rights represents an important development in Catholic political language.
That makes your question about Leo much sharper:
Did Leo XIII successfully preserve the older objective meaning while adopting the new rights vocabulary, or did his new vocabulary contain tensions that later Catholic thinkers could resolve in increasingly modern, subjective-rights terms?
That is the question I'd investigate rather than simply saying either “Leo invented modern rights” or “Leo's rights are perfectly continuous with Aquinas.”
If we put Ernest Fortin directly against my earlier defense of Leo XIII, I think Fortin would make a much deeper criticism than simply saying that Leo used the word “rights” too much.
1. Fortin would challenge my starting point
My earlier defense was roughly:
Leo XIII uses rights, but he embeds them within natural law, duties, virtue, religion, and the common good; therefore his rights language need not represent a break with the classical tradition.
Fortin would probably say this does not settle the historical-philosophical question.
For Fortin, the crucial issue is not whether Leo adds duties to rights. It is what has become primary in the moral and political vocabulary.
The classical tradition begins with:
human nature → human perfection → virtue → justice → common good → duties and what is due
Whereas modern political thought increasingly begins with:
the individual → freedom → rights → claims against others and political authority.
So Fortin could respond:
“You have shown that Leo did not embrace liberalism wholesale. You have not shown that the introduction of rights as a central category did not alter the structure of Catholic political thought.”
That is a much stronger objection.
2. Fortin would probably be sympathetic to Villey's concern
Fortin's Aristotle/Aquinas orientation makes the objective character of justice extremely important.
In the classical conception, ius is closely connected to what is justly due. The question is:
“What does justice require in this concrete relationship?”
Modern rights discourse tends to reverse the emphasis:
“What does this individual possess the right to claim?”
That difference is enormous.
Fortin would therefore be suspicious of my formula:
rights + duties + natural law = orthodox Catholic rights theory.
He could say that this is too easy because the conceptual center of gravity may already have shifted.
3. But Fortin would not necessarily condemn Leo XIII
This is where I think Fortin would be more nuanced than Villey.
Leo XIII is not John Locke or Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Consider Libertas: Leo explicitly rejects the idea that human freedom means an unrestricted right to choose whatever one wishes. Freedom must be ordered toward truth and the good and governed by law.
Likewise, Rerum Novarum places property, labor, authority, family, and social obligations within an objective moral order.
So Fortin could acknowledge:
Leo's substantive teaching remains substantially Thomistic even when his political vocabulary becomes increasingly “rights”-oriented.
That is important.
But Fortin could then ask the uncomfortable question:
Can a fundamentally classical moral substance safely be expressed through a fundamentally modern political vocabulary?
And that is where your larger argument becomes interesting.
4. Fortin would probably distinguish Leo's “rights” from later rights language
This is particularly important for your Vatican II → Francis argument.
There is a possible historical progression:
Classical Catholicism
justice / virtue / duties / common good
↓
Leo XIII
rights increasingly become an explicit political category, but remain subordinated to natural and divine law
↓
Vatican II
“rights” and “religious freedom” become much more prominent
↓
later Catholic social teaching
human rights become a dominant vocabulary
↓
Francis
rights language is frequently applied to questions of conscience, inclusion, social recognition, sexuality, migration, etc.
Fortin would probably resist claiming that Leo caused Francis. That's too linear.
But he might say that Leo's innovation created a vocabulary that could later be detached from the metaphysical framework that originally constrained it.
That is much more defensible.
5. Fortin's deepest criticism of Leo
I think it would be something like this:
Leo attempted to use the language of modernity to defend Christianity without fully accepting modernity's philosophical premises.
That was understandable historically. The Church was confronting liberalism, socialism, secularism, and the modern state.
But Fortin might worry that this strategy contains a structural danger.
Once “rights” become the principal language of political morality, people can gradually forget what makes a right just in the first place.
The question changes from:
“What is objectively good and just?”
to:
“What rights does the individual possess?”
And eventually:
“If I claim a right, what authority can legitimately deny it?”
That is very close to the problem you have been exploring through Villey, Kraynak, Manent, and Rist.
6. Fortin versus Rist
This is where the two scholars could complement each other.
Rist gives you the historical alarm:
Leo XIII represented a significant development in Catholic political vocabulary by making rights much more central.
Fortin gives you the philosophical alarm:
The danger is that the rights framework can alter the underlying conception of political morality by shifting attention from virtue, justice, and the common good toward individual claims.
Villey goes still deeper:
The modern subjective “right” may itself be a corruption of the classical meaning of ius.
Kraynak then asks whether modern natural-rights language can really be identified with the older Christian tradition merely because Christians supplied some of its historical ingredients.
And Manent asks what happens to political community when the individual is conceived primarily as the bearer of rights.
So the four critiques converge without being identical.
The strongest Fortin-style formulation
I would revise my earlier defense of Leo to this:
Leo XIII did not simply abandon the classical Catholic understanding of law, virtue, justice, and the common good. His rights language remained substantially subordinated to natural and divine law. But that does not establish that his increasing reliance upon rights represented no conceptual development. Fortin would press the more fundamental question: whether importing rights as a primary category into Catholic political discourse risks shifting the center of gravity from objective justice and human perfection toward individual claims. The historical significance of Leo's language therefore cannot be dismissed merely by pointing out that he continued to affirm duties and natural law.
That, I think, is much closer to the Fortin critique of my earlier position.
And it also gives you a more sophisticated thesis than “Leo XIII was wrong about rights.” The stronger thesis is: Leo may have preserved the classical substance while introducing a vocabulary whose later development made that substance increasingly vulnerable to reinterpretation.
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