This chapter claims that the language of rights was central to Catholic thought in the long nineteenth century. Rather than rejecting the concept of human rights, Catholic social theorists, theologians, and church leaders embraced it, and utilized it in their effort to update the Church’s teachings to the era of upheavals. The chapter highlights three spheres in which rights proved especially important. First, in response to the French Revolution and the discourse of individual rights, Catholics argued that rights must be understood alongside correlative duties. Theorists like Nicola Spedalieri and Antonio Rosmini claimed that only the Church’s supervision could secure an order in which individual and communal freedoms were secured. Second, Catholics utilized human rights in their evolving struggle against socialism and its challenge to social hierarchies. Influential writers such as Matteo Liberatore claimed that “true” rights required the preservation of “natural” inequality between employers and workers, ideas that were codified in Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum novarum (1891). Finally, rights were useful for Catholic mobilization against feminism and sex reform movements in the late nineteenth century. Popular experts of sexuality such as Joseph Mausbach and Friedrich Wilhelm Förster maintained that only heterosexual marriage and the wife’s submission to the husband could realize the two sexes’ “true” rights.