3 - Explaining the Catholic Turn to Rights in the 1930s

Summary

This chapter casts new light on the turn to rights in the European Catholic Church. It turns away from papal encyclicals and toward the broader universe of Catholic print culture. It uses this methodology to make three principal arguments. First, I locate the turn to rights in the 1930s – or, more specifically, between Hitler’s rise to power (1933) and the end of the Second World War (1945). Second, I use this temporalization to make a claim about why the turn to rights happened – namely, in order to defend traditional Catholic prerogatives at a time when the hegemony of the nation-state became unquestionable. Third, I make a claim about how this happened: rather than dramatically transforming Catholic commitments, the rights turn provided a new vessel for traditional kinds of Catholic commitments. Most Catholics turned to rights in the name of conservatism and even fascist collaboration. Some, though, offered a more progressive account of rights more at home with socialism. Catholics rights talk, like the Church itself, was (and remains) a site of contestation.