Not rally, Catholicism has often led to incredible amounts of violence with and to Protestants. Burning or torturing someone is not a basic human right.
Back then, everybody was burning and torturing each other! It was thanks to the Catholic Church that people don't do that stuff anymore. Think about it. Read some history from legitimate historians who are objective -- not biased on either a Protestant or Catholic perspective -- and you might be surprised. Bronxville, who posts a lot in the Religion Forum, just yesterday posted some great quotes from historians on the other thread, "How Old Is Your Church?"
CHECK IT OUT HERE.
The concept of natural human rights has it's origin in the Catholic Church. Fr. Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest, working with others to develop the New Laws of 1542 to improve treatment of natives in the New World, "defended the doctrine that all men are equally free; on the basis of natural liberty, they proclaimed their right to life, to culture and to property," according to historian Harold Berman.
Vitoria developed his argument from scripture and Church tradition, as well as through reason, that, having been created in God's image and endowed with a rational nature, man possesses a dignity that all other creatures lack. Thus he was able to assert, to the monarchy, that all men were entitled to a degree of treatment from his fellow human beings that no other creature could claim.
Vitoria was heavily influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas. Two concepts were especially key: (1) the divine law, which proceeds from grace, does not annul human law, which proceeds from natural reason; and (2) those things that are natural to man are neither to be taken from nor given to him on account of sin. In other words, the treatment to which ALL human beings were entitlted -- e.g., not to be killed, expropriated, etc. -- whether or not they are baptized, derives from their status AS MEN rather than as members of the faithful in a state of grace. Fr. Domingo de Sotta, who was Vitoria's colleague, put it like this: "Those who are in the grace of God are not a whit better off than the sinner or the pagan in what concerns natural rights."
That's just one example. I could go on and on.
But I think if you look around the world, or simply just right here in our country, you can see that the Catholics have been the consistent and reliable defenders of human rights and pro-life morality when others, including Protestants, were not.
I'll just give you one example -- many more where this one comes from. Consider Fuller Seminary's noterious "church grown" movement, which encouraged the segregation of their congregations. David Currie was there, and writes about this in his book,
Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic. As he explains, "for almost a generation proponents of this movement have taught that mixing cultures and races inhibits the numerical growth of churches...I heard sermons in church advising against interethnic marriages. Some fundamentalist schools, such as Bob Jones University, even forbid interracial dating..." etc. In contrast, the Catholics have always encouraged interractial relations and intermarriage, because of the notion of natural human rights which became increasingly explicit in the doctrines of the Church over time, always going against the grain of the evils of the dominant cultures within which the Church operated, which tended usually to gravitate toward the denial of human rights, e.g. slavery in the U.S. Abortion today.
When I was an Evangelical, before I was in full communion with the Church, I found it very disturbing that some of the large Evangelical churches in the U.S. refused to take a stand against abortion. They were chicken, afriad of the controversy, afraid of losing members. But the Catholic Church has always, always, always been 100% pro-life, and has defended it even when they lost many Catholics as a result. Another example was the eugenics movement in the 20th century U.S., which was strongly opposed by the Catholic Church but supported by many Protestant churches, which were influenced by the money coming from the wealthy supporters of eugenics, such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. Think about how many Catholics left the Church over
Humanae Vitae which was pro-life all the way, including against the use of contraception. Many left the Church, but the Church was undaunted, because the Church has always been unafraid to teach universal truths even when -- especially when -- they go counter to the age. If the Church hadn't done this over the centuries, we would not be where we are today as a civilization. That's just the honest to God truth, whether you're a Catholic or not; it's simply undeniable.
“When I was an Evangelical, before I was in full communion with the Church, I found it very disturbing that some of the large Evangelical churches in the U.S. refused to take a stand against abortion”
I find that disturbing as well. however it is not just Evangelical churches that do that. The Catholic church does that as well in addition to many of its more famous members. Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy ring a bell?
Giving the Catholic church credit for creating civilization is quite a stretch. It could easily be argued they’ve held back civilization with their dogma and militant ideologies. For example refusing to allow the bible to be translated into anything a common person could read, those few that were allowed to learn to read.