Rights and duties
It is not unusual nowadays for disgruntled students, workers and other dissatisfied citizens to claim that their constitutional rights are being violated when they do not get their own way.We have witnessed the destruction of property and facilities in secondary and tertiary colleges by students whose demands have been refused for free education or for a particular academic to be fired.
This concept of freedom does not accord with the Bill of Rights contained in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Still less is it in harmony with the Church’s social teaching.
The Constitution enshrines the rights of all people in our country and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom. The Church goes further, holding consistently that the dignity, equality and freedom of human persons has its origin and destiny in the eternal God.
Created in the likeness of God and accordingly having the powers of reason and free will, human persons willingly affiliate to form society, so that the common good may be advanced to the benefit of each and all.
To be free in one’s community means that one has rights which must be respected by others. It does not mean that one is free to do as one likes, to take the law into one’s own hands or to destroy or steal other people’s property and to violate their persons.
Every social right carries a corresponding social duty to respect the rights of others. Politicians have no right to use public funds for private needs. Students have no right to trash their campus because they feel frustrated. The Catechism says plainly: “The common good is always oriented towards the progress of persons. The order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around. This order is founded on truth, built up in justice, and animated by love” (Paragraph 1912).
Even ancient philosophers well before Christ’s time had clear ideas about the necessity of maintaining a stable society to the benefit of all, and how this fundamentally entails the citizens’ mutual rights and duties.
South Africans, now aware that all are free from enforced racial segregation and oppression, are correctly claiming their constitutional rights when they are truly wronged. This claim, however, is a hollow one unless it goes with the conscious duty to respect the constitutional rights of others.
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