The toast to conscience indeed must precede the toast to the Pope because without conscience there would not be a papacy. All power that the papacy has is power of conscience.

Having evaluated the long trajectory and contested narrative of the relationship between cosmopolitan Catholicism and human rights, we can recognise that Catholicism remains influential in offering competing ideas about the modern state, and international relations. It retains its own distinctiveness and contributes by way of an alternate critical approach to international law. In the view of the Catholic Church, the ethical theory and development of the natural law is a contribution to international law, and its place is arrived at through dialogue about the nature of the relationship between faith and reason. Human rights exist not because they are a modern invention but because they are the practical realisation in law of a prolonged reflection on the just exercise of power.