Justice & Law Quote by Dionigi Tettamanzi

In a single sentence, Tettamanzi tries to disarm a common moral loophole: the idea that power quietly rewrites the ledger of who deserves what. As a Catholic clergyman speaking from within a tradition that treats human dignity as intrinsic rather than earned, he’s insisting that “weak” describes a social condition, not a lesser category of person. The line works because it refuses the patronizing charity model. It doesn’t ask the strong to be nice; it tells them they’re not entitled to different rules.

The phrasing is deliberately corrective. “Not weaker rights” anticipates the slippery language societies use to justify unequal treatment: scaled-down protections for migrants, prisoners, the poor, the unborn, the elderly, the disabled. By pushing to “completely equal,” he closes the door on half-measures and moral discounts. It’s an argument against the quiet bureaucratic violence of exceptions, carve-outs, and “special cases” that always seem to land on the vulnerable.

The subtext is also political, even if it wears ecclesiastical clothing. In late-20th-century Italy, the Church’s public voice often moved between social welfare, bioethics, and immigration. Tettamanzi’s sentence is a lever that can be applied across those battles: a reminder that rights are not trophies awarded to the competent but constraints placed on the powerful. He’s echoing a core Christian inversion - the last are first - but translating it into civic grammar: if rights depend on strength, they aren’t rights, just permissions.