Winnowing Weasel Words
By Tracey Rowland
Popes have long been political players on the stage of the world. In recent times John Paul II worked with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to bring down the Berlin Wall. Benedict XVI addressed a joint sitting of the House of Lords and House of Commons, as well as the Bundestag, reminding politicians that they are not gods or social engineers. Francis will be remembered as the pope who gave the Chinese Communist Party influence over the choice of bishops. The world has been waiting to see what Leo’s contribution to the geo-political situation might be.
The first whiff of papal political smoke appeared with Leo’s address to diplomats, delivered at the Vatican on January 9, 2026. It included an endorsement of the two-state option for Gaza and a recognition that “war is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading” and that this mentality threatens the rule of law. It legitimizes the practice of states violating the borders of others for no other reason than to promote their own strategic objectives.
In addition to this, at the core of the address, as an unexpected element, was a broadside against the ideological debasement of language. Leo warned the diplomats that “a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it.” This, he noted, leads to other consequences that restrict human rights, especially the right of freedom of conscience. He suggested that we are dealing with a “short-circuit” problem in the rights discourse since rights are becoming “disconnected from reality, nature and truth.” The solution, he believes, is to re-discover “the meaning of words.”
Quite simply, Leo recognizes that no real agreements can be achieved if people mean different things when using the same concepts, or if they deliberately use concepts whose meaning is so fuzzy you can give them whatever content you like. This is the hallmark of the weasel word. It can change its shape and content to appeal to its interlocutor. The concept takes its name from the fact that weasels are notoriously skilled at changing their body shapes to get inside places like chicken coops. They have an extraordinarily flexible skeletal structure that includes an elongated spine with extra lumbar vertebrae, very thin spinal processes, and no collarbone. The expression “to weasel one’s way out of something” means to duck and weave and side-step questions so as not to be placed into a position of having to answer a straight question with a straight Yes or No answer. Typically, when placed on the spot under cross-examination, someone wanting to weasel their way out of giving a straight and truthful answer will try to redefine one of the key concepts in the question. President Clinton, for example, tried to redefine the meaning of sexual relations when questioned about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He attempted to narrow the concept to sexual intercourse.
In contrast to the practice of using weasel words and ducking and weaving one’s way around answering questions truthfully, in his address to diplomats Pope Leo declared that there must be certainty about the meaning of concepts and that words need to be “anchored in the truth.” Dialogue partners need to be able to define their terms, even if this allows entry for a Judeo-Christian worldview.
The reason this is remarkable is that the Vatican has spent the last century doing intellectual battle on the territory of competing conceptions of human rights without showing much understanding of why it keeps losing the battles. Pope Leo XIII began the process of assimilating the language of natural rights to Catholic social teaching in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) and this adoption was affirmed by the Vatican’s strong endorsement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
At the time of the drafting of the Universal Declaration, an issue was that of how to account for the foundation of rights. Where do they come from? On what are they based? Delegates from Communist countries had very different answers to these questions from those representing the Catholic countries of Latin America. In the end the Declaration was signed but the lack of agreement on the foundations gave rise to different interpretations of the substantive rights. In 1999, in a similar address to Italian jurists, John Paul II argued that without “a widespread, universal consensus on their foundation,” the use of rights language “runs the risk of obtaining modest results or of confusing authentic rights with subjective and selfish demands.” Pope Benedict also insisted that the foundations matter and recognized that different foundations give rise to different interpretations.
Leo clearly recognizes the problem and associates it with an ideological use of language. Meanings, he says, have become fluid, ambiguous concepts, and “in the contortions of semantic ambiguity,” language has become an ideological weapon.
Bravo Leo! Bring an end to the ideological shadowboxing! There is no point in Vatican diplomats entering into dialogue with people who use weasel words to avoid talking about what is really at stake or to paper-over a policy that might be contentious. Avoiding the use of the word “abortion” by calling it “reproductive health” does not fool anyone. Leo wants to clear the air with intellectual honesty. He is open to having dialogue about different conceptions of human dignity and their foundations, but not a phony dialogue.
If we agree not to use weasel words, the positions people take on social practices like abortion and surrogacy and euthanasia—all condemned by Leo in the latter half of his address—can be understood as different understandings of the meaning and value of human life. The dialogue can begin to include discussions about why Jews and Christians and people from many of the Asian wisdom traditions think that human life is sacred. This approach to human life can then be contrasted with the materialist view which fosters the treatment of human lives as commodities.
While all Catholic scholars agree with what the Church means when she speaks about human rights, quite a growing list of Catholic scholars, in addition to Anglican scholars, are of the view that the Church’s valiant attempts to defend human dignity using the idiom of rights is not a good idea, strategically speaking. It has meant that Catholic leaders keep running up against the short-circuit problem.
Alasdair MacIntyre argued that there exist certain idioms that have been designed to thwart intellectual appeals to first principles and thereby obscure or paper-over the fault lines between different moral traditions. He thought the idiom of rights was the prime example of this. Another common example is the use of the word “partner” to denote any array of relationships rather than “spouse,” a word that implies that there is a sacramental dimension to the relationship. Some of the leading Catholic names who have been critical of the employment of the rights idiom include the late and great James V. Schall, SJ who was a professor of political philosophy at both the Gregorian and Georgetown Universities, the late David L. Schindler, who was the Dean of the St. John Paul II Institute in Washington DC, the late Fr. Ernest Fortin, AA who taught political philosophy at Boston College, and Robert P. Kraynak, professor of political science and director of the Center for Free Western Civilization at Colgate University. Some of the leading Anglican names include John Milbank, Adrian Pabst, Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan. Their criticisms, along with the recent remarks from Pope Leo, suggest that maybe what we need now is an “audit” on the success or otherwise of the Church’s employment of the idiom of rights to defend human dignity.
A recent work by Professor John Loughlin titled Human Dignity: Its Roots and Challenges in Western Thought1 provides a panoramic account of the treatment of the concept of human dignity from the Book of Genesis, through the books of the New Testament, the teaching of the early Church Fathers, the medieval scholastics, the scholars of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Eighteenth Century “Enlightenment” and the Nineteenth century Romantic movement, right up to the personalist philosophy of the twentieth century and the human rights framework. It offers an exposition of what the various competing philosophical traditions have to say about human dignity, including an identification of the fault lines between the traditions. There is no attempt to paper-over or evade the fault lines by recourse to weasel words. The book ends with an appendix offered by the author titled “A Proposed Declaration of Human Dignity According to the Catholic Church.” Arguably it is such a declaration focused on a Catholic understanding of human dignity that we most need now, not more time wasted on intellectual battles where the game plan is rigged against us from the beginning. As Michael Ignatieff argued in his book Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry,2 “secularism has become the lingua franca of global human rights as English has become the lingua franca of the global economy.”
Rather than getting bogged down in a battle between rival rights, such as the right to life versus the right of a woman to control her own fertility, it may be more evangelically fruitful if we reframed the debate entirely, leaving out references to rights. For example, we could speak of a conception of life as a sacred gift versus a conception of life as a commodity. This would at least steer the public discussion onto the issue of whether human life is anything more than a cluster of biological parts. In the context of the abortion debate we could also use the slogan promoted by the Irish pro-life movement, “love them both.” “Love them both” de-demonizes the mother cast in the role of a murderer and de-demonizes the child cast in the role of an unwanted invader. It reframes the issue as a human problem requiring a human solution, not a mere biological problem requiring a technological solution.
As a component of any such “audit” on the adoption of the rights rhetoric it should be noted that numerous tyrannical governments in the twentieth century had bills of rights or recognized rights in their written constitutions, including the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Even Uganda had a bill of rights written into its 1967 Constitution that Idi Amin’s military dictatorship proceeded to ignore throughout the 1970s. Rights themselves mean little if they are not operating within a culture that respects human dignity, and human dignity is most respected in cultures that contain some understanding that human beings are made in the image of God or, at least, that human life is in some sense sacred. Politics and culture are always downstream of theology.
Worldwide there are now some 1.4 billion Catholics so when Leo says that public leaders need to speak clearly and not short-circuit discussions by recourse to ideological jargon, he has the weight of quite a large team behind him. It will be interesting to see whether his words of advice to diplomats filter down to the level of diocesan chanceries and Catholic agencies. These institutions often produce documents infamous for their own “contortions of semantic ambiguity” making them incomprehensible to many faithful Catholics.
Tracey Rowland holds the St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia). In 2020 she won the Ratzinger Prize for Theology and in 2023 she was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences. Her newest book is Introducing Communio Theology. Read Tracey’s other WWNN essays.
London: Bloomsbury, 2026.
Princeton University Press, 2001.