World-renowned human rights lawyer Frank Brennan, S.J., spoke to an overflow crowd of more than 800 University of Scranton students, faculty, staff and guests at the Inauguration Lecture Sept. 13, which was one of several events celebrating the Inauguration of Kevin P. Quinn, S.J., as the University’s 25th president.

Father Brennan’s speech, entitled “A Jesuit Perspective on Making Human Rights and Religion Friends, Not Foes,” posed how religion and human rights could work together to help those less fortunate in society.  Speaking from many of his experiences working with “marginalized” people, Father Brennan’s message encouraged the audience to not push religion aside in the quest for human rights. He said “once we abandon any religious sense that the human person is created in the image and likeness of God … it may be very difficult to maintain a human rights commitment to the weakest and most despised in society.”

Father Brennan explained the difficulty with much human rights discourse stems from it too readily being reduced to assertions narrowly focused on individual rights and non-discrimination. He believes human rights discourse needs to be more subtle when it involves a conflict-of-rights situation or when the law has to consider the public interest or the common good, as well as individual liberties. He said in the public square, human rights discourse is usually conducted against a backdrop of presumed atheism and without much serious consideration for the rights of religious freedom and conscience.

In his lecture, Father Brennan outlined the challenge to the contemporary Jesuit university: that of providing a truly Catholic ambience where every intellectual idea about human rights can be examined from all sides, espousing human dignity in the light of the Church’s tradition.

Father Brennan urged the audience to use Father Quinn’s inauguration and the “forthcoming Quinn era” to make The University of Scranton a “privileged place where religion and human rights walk hand-in-hand for the well-being of persons and societies here, far away, down under and all places in between.”

Father Brennan has studied at several universities across his native Australia and was a Fulbright scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, where he first befriended Father Quinn. Father Brennan is also a published author, having written on topics ranging from civil liberties to Aboriginal rights. He has worked extensively with refugees, particularly as the director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in East Timor after its independence and was even named one of Australia’s Living National Treasures. He currently serves as a law professor at the Australian Catholic University.

Prior to Father Brennan’s speech, several University staff and members of the Scranton community welcomed the speaker.  Patrick Leahy, Ed.D., executive vice president, served as master of ceremonies. Elise Gower, the coordinator of the International Service Program, gave the invocation. The Honorable James Gibbons ’79, magisterial district judge for Lackawanna County, introduced Father Brennan.

The lecture took place in the Rev. Bernard R. McIllhenny, S.J., Ballroom of the DeNaples Center.