The writer of Hebrews, for instance, exhorts us to welcome strangers, for thereby some have unknowingly entertained angels. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that at the end of time, Jesus will welcome his own into his father’s kingdom with these words: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.” (Matthew 25)

What has this to do with current thinking on human rights and the contribution of Catholic theologians to it? Christian Scripture paved the way for a 16th century Spanish Dominican to become the first person to formulate and teach a theory of human rights as universal – belonging to all men equally, even strangers.

A daring Domincan

Francisco de Vitoria is today recognised as one of the founders of modern international law for his contributions to the concept of ius gentium – the rights of peoples – but this recognition has come after centuries of neglect of his work. One reason for this is that Vitoria himself left little written evidence of his thinking. He seems to have devoted his life to teaching and wrote and published little. The saving grace was that his students recognised the significance of his philosophy. They kept notes of his lectures and had these published after his death in 1546.

Another reason is that the work of Vitoria and other 16th century Catholic scholars was eclipsed by the philosophical insights of the European Enlightenment, which swept across the western half of the continent in the 18th century. Thereafter, and for over a hundred years, the credit for developing the idea of “the rights of man” went solely to these Enlightenment thinkers.

Only in the 20th century did scholars begin to revisit and recognise the contributions of Vitoria and other Spanish scholastics. Today Vitoria’s name is commonly cited at international human rights fora. A statue of him also stands outside the United Nations building in New York.

The Dominican Order to which Vitoria belonged continues to champion the cause that he first took up five hundred years ago. In 1998, the order set up the Dominicans for Peace and Justice, a non-government organization with a permanent presence at the United Nations Commission for Human Rights. It also created the Friar Francisco de Vitoria Fund in 2004, to help the order “witness to the Gospel message at the frontiers and in speaking truth to the international community on justice and human rights issues”.

The crux of his teaching is that human rights belong to each and every person by virtue of his having been made in the image of God. No one is to be excluded.