For the Secretary of State, "it is more and more difficult to provide for an effective and universal protection of rights, without a link to the natural law that gives birth to the rights themselves and is opposed to the degradation that in many societies of ours" is calling into question "the ethic of life and procreation, of marriage and family life, as well as of education and the formation of young generations, and is only introducing an individualistic vision on which new rights can be built, whose content and judicial reason are not better defined." "Rights," he warned "cannot be boxes that are filled with different meanings and elements depending on various historical, cultural and political moments;" their "common root" is to be found in natural law that, as Benedict XVI said to the UN, "is written in the human heart." The Declaration of 1948, in which the Church "recognised a sign of the times," "is an end point," concluded Bertone. "But it should also and always be a starting point for it must not only defend freedom and its rules, but also keep them from degenerating into the denial of the human being’s primacy." ” “
