“Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the word planned and created by God” (Pope Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge).
Thus here we have encoded within the cells of the Magisterium itself a recognition that race not only has extramental existence, albeit as an emergent property, but that it is a fundamental value to the human community. And if it is to be counted among the fundamental values of the human community then this necessarily implies the right to preserve and defend it as such. As South African theologian Fr. P Bonaventura Hinwood in his treatise Race: the Reflections of a Theologian has put it, explicating the wisdom of Pius XI,
“Since being and goodness are convertible, race, like any other human factor not inherently vitiated by error or evil, being a positive good, has the right to existence and identity. But race is not an end in itself, because it exists for the enriching of mankind, to which it is subordinate, and so necessarily relative. It is not, therefore, the immediate cause of the rights which accrue to it, but the occasion of them, for the sake of mankind as a whole. The fullness of which will be enhanced by these particular racial potentialities being brought to maturity. Since mankind has a right not to be mutilated by the violent destruction of any race, it is licit for a person even to lay down his life for the conservation of his race.”
