ethical standards for social and political life. They affirmed human rights as a common standard across all cultures and social systems. This is what the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had sought in 1948, when they formulated that document. In recent years, however, some political leaders, particularly in East Asia and Africa, and some postmodern theorists have challenged the universality of human rights in the name of respect for cultural diversity. Religious differences in the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, and between India and Pakistan have led some to predict a clash of civilizations and religions, in which the idea of a common humanity would be lost in the midst of conflict. Though all who gathered in Padua were Catholic, they were keenly alert tothe cultural and social contexts of their own societies. So the consensus on human rights signaled that a greater unity of moral vision is possible, both in the church and the larger world, than is predicted by the clash-of-civilizations theorists. The consensus was a striking sign of our times.

A Korean participant, for example, described the moral challenges in his society as human rights issues. He treated the rising use of abortion to select the gender of offspring as a high-tech, sexist violation of the right to life and described his government’s restriction of religious expression as a violation of the right to a fundamental freedom. Theologians from India and the Philippines also relied extensively on language of human rights to express the challenges of interreligious conflict that they