Development as Human Rights: An Examination of Catholic Social Teaching and the Right to Development

Thesis advisor: David HollenbachThis dissertation looks at the reality of massive and persistent global poverty and underdevelopment in the era of globalization and the attempts to address this reality in both Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and various elements of secular theory and policy. It details that there has been a convergence of human rights and development discourse in both CST and secular thought and global public policy, and seeks a policy framework and ethical agenda for achieving “development as the realization of human rights” from a Catholic perspective. Having delineated the differences between various “Rights Based Approaches to Development” and multiples shortcomings in global public policy, the dissertation argues that the “Right to Development”(RTD) approach best reflects CST’s understanding of human rights as both a chief end and primary means of achieving development. Further, it insists on achievement of development so understood an urgent matter of justice, as itself a human right. It thus makes the case that the RTD can serve as a “carrier” of the tradition, acting as a consensus framework with which to address gaps and failures in responsibility and accountability in global governance, to serve as a guarantor of the indivisibility of all human rights, and to formulate a codification of the multiples obligations on varied global actors to strengthen the indivisibility and universality of rights and the participatory process necessary to secure them. It also argues that the Catholic Church therefore can and must work to see that the RTD approach undergo a re-invigoration in both international law and as an ethical vision in civil society. In short, then, it argues that the RTD and CST should act as allies in the common goal of development understood as the participatory realization of the full spectrum of human rights.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Theology