Podstawowe normy moralne i prawa człowieka

Abstract

The Church’s social doctrine and consequently Catholic social teaching employ interdisciplinary and even multidisciplinary methods. This approach provides a complete picture of the human person as spiritual and bodily unity along with the innate and supernatural dignity of the human being justified by philosophical, theological and biblical anthropology. Human dignity is the supreme moral norm. Expressed in the language of law, it becomes a legal value and forms the basis for other principles and the source of all human rights. The first and foremost right of the human person is the right to life from conception to natural death. Each of us has personal, freedom-related, economic and cultural rights. Primate Stefan Wyszyński regarded the right to love as second only to the right to life; he also referred to the duty of love, which was a novelty. It should be stressed that Wyszyński played the most significant role in Poland after World War II. The Church protects the human person through its doctrine and education. People are capable of doing good and devising fair systems, but is also unfortunately able to do evil. Guided by egoism – the desire for power and profit – and seduced by false ideologies, they frequently set up totalitarian systems. This explains why the Church firmly rejects the ideologies of communism and liberalism. According to John Paul II, ‘…we cannot accept the claim that after the demise of social realism, capitalism remains the only model of economic organization.” Catholic social teaching is referred to as a personalistic doctrine, a concept developed by Jacques Maritain. The Church protects the human being through its doctrine and education, as those are the only means available for use. It is not the human person that should serve the Church or the state, but the other way round. After all, what really matters here is not just recognition or fulfillment of moral norms or human rights, as that would be art for art’s sake (sheer formalism). Each of us needs protection since we are imago Dei (a likeness of God); since we are the world’s great miracle (magnum miraculum mundi); since we are equipped with absolute dignity (Kant); since God Himself regards human dignity with respect (Pope Leon XIII); since it only with the human person on earth that God shares His reasonable freedom (Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński); and since each human countenance reflects the gleam of God’s glory (Pope John Paul II).