Introduction Christmas Day, 1942. The outcome of World War II was undecided. A month before, the tide at Stalingrad had turned against the Germans; just two days before, General Erich von Manstein had abandoned his efforts to relieve the Wehrmacht''s doomed Sixth Army. Still, there was no telling that the extraordinary German strength in the war on display so far would now ebb quickly. Nonetheless, the Roman Catholic pope, Pius XII, had something new to say. The Americans had formally entered the war a year before, but the Allies would not reach mainland Italy for another nine months, or make it to Rome for a year and a half. The pope felt himself in dire straits. His relationship with Benito Mussolini had long since soured, and he was a prisoner in his own tiny Roman domain.

As for the Jews, the worst victims of the conflict, millions were dead already; the victims at Babi Yar had lain in their ravine for more than a year; Treblinka, the most infernal death camp, had begun killing operations six months before and much of its grim work was already complete. Officially, of course, the papacy and its leader were neutral in the war, and did not play politics. Many of Pius''s flock, however, were to be found on all sides of the war. To the extent recent observers have revisited Pius''s Christmas message, it has been to argue about whether he could or should have said more about the Holocaust than he did. But the real interest in the message is what the pontiff was for, not what he was against. In this fight, Christianity stood for values, and in the perspective of world history, Pius XII had some new ones. On that day, the appeal to reaffirm faith in the dignity of the human person, and in the rights that follow from that dignity, reached unprecedented heights of public visibility. The very first of the five peace points that Pius XII offered that day ran as follows: Dignity of the Human Person .

He who would have the Star of Peace shine out and stand over society should cooperate, for his part, in giving back to the human person the dignity given to it by God from the very beginning . He should uphold respect for and the practical realization of . fundamental personal rights . The cure of this situation becomes feasible when we awaken again the consciousness of a juridical order resting on the supreme dominion of God, and safeguarded from all human whims; a consciousness of an order which stretches forth its arm, in protection or punishment, over the unforgettable rights of man and protects them against the attacks of every human power.It was a critical turning point, one that defines history since, if not exactly in ways that Pius XII intended. People now treat such affirmations, and especially the notion that human dignity provides the foundation for universal human rights, as a set of conventional and enduring truths. Yet it was all rather new at the time. The Roman Catholic Church had previously rejected the hitherto secular and liberal language of human rights.

But now the pope turned to it, making human dignity its new basis. Around the same time, ecumenical formations of transatlantic Protestant elites proclaimed human rights to be the key to future world order. The communion between human rights and Christianity was therefore a novel and fateful departure in the history of political discourse. Undoubtedly, the pope''s first peace point was the supreme, influential, and most publicly prominent invocation of human dignity during World War II proper and likely in the whole history of political claim-making to that date. It gave Christian "personalism" a broad hearing, attaching supreme ethical significance to human beings agonizingly caught between individualist atomism without community and "totalitarian" statehood without freedom. Alongside novel Protestant discussion, it was also at or near the top of the list of prominent wartime invocations of the basic idea of universal human rights, especially when understood as a framework--as Pius XII would express it very clearly two years later in his 1944 Christmas message--of world and not merely state order. But what did such conceptions mean as they made their way into, and did much to define, democratic and international ideals after the war? The history of human rights in the 1940s was hardly just a matter of Christians merely adopting longstanding rhetoric or even commitments, in spite of the long prior history of rights in various forms and settings. Amplifying the importance of human rights before a vast public, Pius''s statement also recrafted the meaning of the principles it merely claimed to recall to importance.

It made what had been secular and liberal into a set of values that were now religious and conservative. And it provided an inkling of how Christians would come to defend the postwar democracies they later founded in Western Europe, which were religious and conservative in nature. This book tells the story of how this happened. *** The ideological association of Christianity and human rights depended on contingent and timebound circumstance no later than the 1940s and shortly before. Far from teaching us simply about the Christian invention of human rights in the 1940s, interesting and important as that development was, the history of this crystallizing moment casts light on the fortunes of the concept as a whole. Not the least of the reasons is that it turns out to be quite difficult to find non-Christians who enthused about human rights, and more especially their basis in human dignity, in the age. The history of Christian human rights in the 1940s is the major part of the history of human rights generally at the time, before the principles became the slogan of a mass movements and a central element of contemporary international law. Mainstream observers are generally unaware of--for their secular historians have nervously bypassed--the Christian incarnation of human rights, which interferes with their preferred understandings of today''s highest principles.

Meanwhile, those interested in Christian sources, overwhelmingly Christians themselves, are prone to misinterpret them. The proposition that human rights arose with profound connections to Christian contexts is normally defended, in both public discourse and scholarly arguments, in a highly abstract way and about long ago events. It was from "the biblical conception of man," Pope John Paul II noted in 2003, that "Europe drew the best of its humanistic culture, and, not least, advanced the dignity of the person as the subject of inalienable rights." Preference for classic sources that supposedly cast the die for Christianity''s advocacy of human rights across the millennia is especially evident among certain Christians who most want to take credit for what have become the premier values of the day, precisely in view of their contemporary prestige. According to such views, it is rather old Christian lineages--stretching from the Annunciation to the Reformation--that help explain the existence, shape, and prestige of the idea of human rights today. Looking back that far is not a mere distraction. No one could plausibly claim--and no one ever has--that the history of human rights is one of wholly discontinuous novelty, whether in the 1940s or after. But radical departures nonetheless occurred very late in Christian history, even if they were unfailingly represented as consistent with what came before: this is how "the invention of tradition" most frequently works.

Christian human rights were injected into tradition by pretending they had always been there, and on the basis of minor antecedents now treated as fonts of enduring commitments. Novelty always comes about not ex nihilo but from a fragmentary past that is coaxed into more robust form. Even partial continuity across time often proceeds through rediscovery and reactivation of lost possibilities and underemphasized realities. Many of those who want the ideological association of Christianity and human rights to be deep and lasting are participants in such inventions rather than analysts of them, for they play down or pass over the fact that Christianity had mostly stood for values inimical to those we now associate with human rights. It took a set of wrenching experiences for Christianity to come to seem favorable to them. This book tries to understand how large an impact those experiences made--and how much continuity they left behind. The truth is that Europe and therefore the modern world drew nearly everything from Christianity in the long term. It would be fictitious to retrospectively edit the long and tumultuous history of Europe, as if everything we liked about the outcomes were due to its hegemonic religion, while the rest was an unfortunate accident or someone else''s fault.

And to the extent this is true, the challenge of isolating the crucial period for a strong ideological link of Christianity with human rights changes. It means looking not so much at Jesus (or even at the Reformation), but at novel mid-twentieth century interpretations of what his teachings demand, to understand how the huge set of possibilities the Christian legacy bequeathed was winnowed down. The trouble, after all, is not so much that Christianity accounts for nothing, as that it accounts for everything. Without Christianity, our commitment to the moral equality of human beings is unlikely to have come about, but by itself this had no bearing on most forms of political equality--whether between Christians and Jews, whites and blacks, civilized and savage, or men and women. That had been true for millennia, and it was mostly still true on Christmas Day, 1942. If the winnowing of Christian values was not complete (and never is, since traditions are never set), it was above all because the war was undecided. Pius''s peace points are fa.