Pope Benedict on the United Nations

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - May 9, 2008

Faithful Catholics in America and abroad have long had concerns about the United Nations. Unlike with secular criticism of the institution, these apprehensions do not center fundamentally on the existence of a supernational authority, or the corruption scandals that have recently been exposed, or its track-record of impotent diplomacy in dealing with rogue states. The Catholic criticism has mainly focused on the way this potential instrument for great good has been rather easily and regularly manipulated to advance the cause of evil. The most notable examples of its being a tool for ill are the 1994 Cairo Conference and the 1995 Beijing Conference — both of which tried to advance a universal right to abortion and the weakening of the traditional family — but similar maleficence has often occurred clandestinely through the practices of various U.N. commissions on the ground.

In a 1997 preface for Michel Schooyans' "The Gospel Confronting World Disorder," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger joined his voice to this criticism. He said that through the instrumentality of the United Nations and its international conferences, some are trying to advance a new philosophy of man and the world that will ultimately lead to man's and the world's destruction.

"This philosophy," the future Pope Benedict writes, "recommends, without seeking to justify itself, not worrying about taking care of those who are no longer productive nor have any hope of a quality life… On the contrary, it recommends ways of reducing the number of participants at humanity's table, so that at least the so-called happiness, already acquired by some, will not be touched. The typical character of this new anthropology, which is at the basis of the New World Order, is revealed above all in the image of woman, in the ideology of 'Women's empowerment,' proposed at Beijing. The goal is the self-realization of women for whom the principle obstacles are the family and maternity.

"In the fear of maternity," he continues, "there is something more profound at play. The other person is always, in the end, a competitor who takes away part of my life, a menace to my Ego and my free development. Today we no longer have a 'philosophy of love,' but only a 'philosophy of egotism.' The notion that I can enrich myself simply in the gift that I can find beginning with the other and through my being-for-another — all that is rejected as an idealistic illusion. But it is precisely there that man is deceived. In effect, when he is advised against loving, he is actually counseled not to be man."

In short, this false anthropology leads to unjust and evil public policies. "How will the rights of the humblest be respect and promoted," he poignantly asks, "when our conception of man so often is based … on jealousy, anxiety, fear and even hate? How can an ideology that recommends sterilization, abortion, systematic contraception and even euthanasia as the price of an unbridled pansexualism bring men and women to the joy of living and loving?"

This is the necessary background to capture what Pope Benedict said and did at the United Nations on April 18, and why. His masterful address was an attempt, in a very positive and scholarly way, to present a correct conception of man in response to the erroneous and disastrous one that has marked many recent U.N. initiatives.

He advertised this intention to the journalists on the plane to the United States. The purpose of his visit to the U.N., he stated, was to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," which he called the "anthropological base, the founding philosophy of the United Nations, the human and spiritual base on which it is constructed." The anthropology of the Declaration "recognized in man the subject of rights, coming before all institutions, with common values that must be respected by everyone," but in recent years the U.N. has entered into a "values crisis." He was coming to "reconfirm" the Declaration's philosophy of man and "recover it for our future."

During his April 18 address, the Holy Father tried to guide the United Nations out of the crisis in values that undermines not only its effectiveness but the common good. He did so mainly by reminding the ambassadors about the wisdom and circumstances that led to the founding of the United Nations immediately after World War II.

It was obvious to U.N. founders six decades ago that there needed to be an institution to protect the human rights and dignity of those in states — like Nazi Germany — intent on trampling those rights. The first duty of a state, Benedict said, is "to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises." When a state is incapable or unwilling to fulfill that responsibility, then, according to the principle of subsidiarity, "the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations Charter and in other international instruments."

But it was also obvious to the founders that this protection could not be given in a fair and consistent way unless it was based on an anthropology that was both true and accepted. The fundamental error of Nazism, which Benedict saw up close as a young boy, was anthropological: not only did Nazis fail to recognize and respect the humanity of the Jews; not only did they have a false Arian superiority complex based not on love but on a Nietzschean will to power; but, in an effort to usurp unbridled power for the state, they tried to cut man off from his Creator as the guarantor of his dignity and rights. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights was the result of efforts to give a proper anthropological basis to the human dignity and rights that the United Nations was established to protect.

"It is evident that the rights recognized and expounded in the Declaration," Benedict stated, "apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God's creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks."

Benedict sees that the same relativistic conceptions that nearly triumphed at the U.N. conferences in Cairo and Beijing are still very much at work in trying to change the clear meaning of the Declaration to justify the elimination of certain rights the Declaration sought to protect, like the right to life and to religious freedom. "Today efforts need to be redoubled," he stressed, "in the face of pressure to reinterpret the foundations of the Declaration and to compromise its inner unity so as to facilitate a move away from the protection of human dignity towards the satisfaction of simple interests, often particular interests. The Declaration … cannot be applied piecemeal, according to trends or selective choices that merely run the risk of contradicting the unity of the human person and thus the indivisibility of human rights."

Human rights are not the "exclusive result of legislative enactments," he added, but are rooted in indivisible human dignity and in the unchanging principles of justice and solidarity that teach us that we should not do to others what we would not want done to us.

This was recognized by the founders of the U.N. sixty years ago. For the U.N. today to achieve its founders' hopes and respond to the world's needs, it must, as Benedict stressed, rediscover this wisdom and act in accordance with it.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.