Get rid of your 'false hang-ups' and be disciples of Christ, cardinal says

Rome, Nov 14, 2008 / 11:49 pm (CNA).- The president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, Cardinal Stanyslaw Rylko, said this week, “The time has come to free ourselves from our false hang-ups of inferiority towards the secular world and courageously be ourselves, disciples of Christ.”

During his remarks at the opening of the Council’s plenary assembly, which this year is focused on the theme, “Twenty years after Christifideles laici: memory, development and new challenges and tasks,” the cardinal stated that “our true problem is not being a minority, but rather having voluntarily become marginal, irrelevant, because of our lack of courage, so that we will be left alone, because of our mediocrity.”

According to the L’Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Rylko denounced the “dictatorship of relativism” that Pope Benedict XVI has correctly identified, in which universal truth does not exist.

“The rush to create a ‘new man’ completely detached from the Judeo-Christian tradition, a new ‘world order,’ a new ‘global ethic,’ is gaining ground,” the cardinal said, and thus a “new anti-Christianity” is emerging that makes it politically correct to attack Christians and Catholics in particular.

“Whoever wishes to live and act according to the Gospel of Christ in the Western liberal democracies must pay a price,” he stated.

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Human rights are not arbitrary, they are the fruit of natural law, says Vatican expert

Rome, Aug 29, 2008 / 03:39 am (CNA).- The undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, Guzman Carriquiry Lecour, said in an address this week that human rights are based on natural law and that denying this truth opens the door to relativism.

During a ceremony in which he was awarded an honorary Doctorate by the University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Carriquiry said, “What they are trying to do is turn into individual rights that which attacks fundamental human rights of the person.”

During his extensive discourse, he pointed out that 60 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a “relativist derivative” exists in which “new rights are imposed” that stem from the “arbitrary desires” of certain groups or individuals.

“Are we not the witnesses of opinion campaigns and pressure from international powers to foster national legislation to introduce forms of liberalizing abortion and unrestricted bioethical manipulations, of making same-sex unions the equivalent of marriage, of promoting eugenic and euthanasia practices,” Carriquiry said.

Quoting Jacques Maritain, he recalled that “human rights cannot be arbitrary, they must be universally applied and be well-founded upon reason.” Rights, he said, “are not oblivious or evident by themselves.”

“If human rights are not established, they are left baseless,” he added. “They remain at the mercy of whoever is in power” and only reflect a government that is merely democratic in name.

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