The Rights of the Child and the Desires of Adults

Why the Church's ancient anthropology stands against the commodification of human life

There are crimes so terrible that they force us to confront not merely the depravity of individual men, but the assumptions of the age in which we live. The appalling abuse and murder of a vulnerable child by those entrusted with his care (see this report from the BBC) belongs among those dark moments which compel society to look beyond the courtroom and ask deeper questions. Human wickedness is tragically universal, Saint Augustine said: “I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself.” (From Confessions). Yet moments such as these oblige us to consider the moral and anthropological foundations upon which we have chosen to build our common life.

Catholics have always begun not with the desires of adults, but with the dignity of the child. A child is not a possession, a project, a bauble, a status symbol or the fulfilment of an emotional aspiration. He or she is a person, created in the image and likeness of God, possessing rights which precede the claims of those who would raise him. Modern society increasingly speaks of the rights of adults to become parents, but the language of rights becomes distorted when detached from its proper object. There is no natural right to a child. There are, however, rights belonging to the child himself.

Yet the conflict which brought Catholic adoption agencies to extinction was never merely about law or discrimination. Beneath the headlines lay a far more fundamental question, one which reaches to the heart of what it means to be human. Is parenthood ordered primarily towards the desires of adults, or towards the rights and flourishing of children? And what happens to a civilisation when it forgets the difference?