Results tagged “United Nations” from Religion & Ethics: The Pope's Visit

Commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Pope Benedict XVI devoted most of his UN General Assembly speech to a philosophical explication of the moral foundations of human rights and of the UN itself. He called on the UN to attend to the moral anchors that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In his exploration of the roots of human rights he articulated the following key ideas:

• SUBSIDIARITY: The principle of subsidiarity, he suggests, should inspire and govern the work of the UN. This principle says that nothing should be done at a level higher than is necessary. The UN should deal with those problems that can only be solved at the global level and should leave to the individual states those issues that can be handled justly at the national level.


• THE RIGHT TO PROTECT: Basing himself on this perspective of subsidiarity, the pope put a surprising emphasis on what many consider a new principle in international relations: the right to protect. He said the right to protect was already present implicitly at the founding of the UN and at the origin of international law. One of the essential functions of the state is to protect its own people. If the state is unwilling or unable to guarantee that protection, then the international community must intervene through the juridical power provided in the UN charter and in other international instruments. Presumably he is referring, for example, to chapter 7 provisions of the charter which allow the Security Council to authorize force and interventions. The pope sees this responsibility of the international community to intervene to protect as an expression of the importance of preserving human dignity.


• THE POWERFUL FEW: Alluding to the lock that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have on these kinds of decisions to intervene, the pope suggests that these decisions are "subordinated to the decisions of a few" instead of "collective action by the international community." Is he taking the side of the General Assembly against the power of the Security Council?


• NOT A MATTER OF LAW ALONE: Respect for human rights, he said, has become an important indicator of whether a society has attained the social conditions where human beings can fully develop and flourish. These social conditions, however, can not be reached merely through legislation and rule-making. It is not, at its heart, a matter of managing or "balancing" competing human rights. Nor should human rights be presented purely in terms of legality or, as he said, human rights "risk becoming weak propositions divorced from their ethical and rational dimension which is their foundation and goal." Rights must be seen as an expression of a common sense of human justice universally applicable in every society.


• RIGHT TO RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: The pope noted that human rights must also include the right to religious freedom which is more than freedom of worship. Religious freedom must also include the freedom of all religious believers to participate fully in society, contributing to the common good. It should never be necessary, he said, "to deny God in order to enjoy one's rights."


• INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE: The pope sees great benefits flowing from conversations between religions. The United Nations should support these dialogues, but the conversations should be divorced from the political forum of the UN.


• ACCEPTING THE ENTIRE DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: The pope expressed concern about efforts to reinterpret the foundations of the Universal Declaration in order to serve "particular interests." By this he was probably referring to attempts to treat the Universal Declaration as a "cafeteria" document, where governments can pick and choose which human rights they want to promote. Benedict insists that the document was adopted as a unitary standard and should not be applied "piecemeal."  

-- Richard Ryscavage, S.J. is professor of sociology and international studies and director of the Center for Faith and Public Life at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

Watch a behind the scenes slideshow by R & E senior associate producer Patti Jette Hanley of the program's live coverage of the pope's UN visit.

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In a live special report on the pope's address to the United Nations Friday (April 18), RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY managing editor Kim Lawton and executive editor Bob Abernethy analyze the speech and how it amplifies key themes of Pope Benedict's papacy. They also discuss the significance of other events of the pope's U.S. visit.

Today Pope Benedict XVI, like his predecessors Paul VI and John Paul II (twice), made a religious-political pilgrimage to the United Nations. The Catholic Church, which suffered greatly from both Catholic and Protestant nationalisms of the Westphalian system of sovereign nation states(1648-1918), remains anchored in the global system both institutionally and theologically. Indeed, support for the United Nations has endured as a central tenet of Vatican foreign policy and Catholic social theory throughout the postwar period. This support, as Benedict said, is rooted in "the unity of the human family" and in "the innate dignity of every man and woman."

The pope reprised John Paul II's call for a "great degree of international ordering," respecting, of course, the principle of subsidiarity, which calls for action at the lowest effective level. Benedict stated "it is necessary to recognize the higher role played by rules and structures that are intrinsically ordered to promote the common good, and therefore to safeguard human freedom." The pope emphasized that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights found its basis not just in positive law, but "by the common desire to place the human person at the heart of institutions, laws and the working of society". Therefore "human rights are increasingly being presented as the common language and the ethical substratum of international relations."

Most religious thought, including this speech, emphasizes that rights also call for responsibilities. Interreligious dialogue must bring together all people of good will to solve global problems like war, poverty, and environmental degradation. Benedict especially mentioned "those countries of Africa and other parts of the world which remain on the margins of authentic integral development, and are therefore at risk of experiencing only the negative effects of globalization." Theologically the pope tied the UN's "responsibility to protect" to previous writings of the sixteenth-century friar-scholar Francisco de Vitoria and strong support for universal human rights to the fifth-century bishop Augustine. The pope also emphasized the crucial importance of religious freedom among human rights.

What role, then, can the pope and other religious leaders like the Dalai Lama and Jewish and Islamic scholars play in "the new world disorder" of the twenty-first century? We have all left the "security" of the Cold War paradigm for an increasingly fragmented, chaotic, and polarized world at all levels, from the very local to the most global. The rise of countries like China, India, and Brazil and the communications revolution mean that many more nationalisms will have to be factored into any common decisions. In fact, any global problem worth solving, from Darfur to Palestine to global warming, will require the cooperative efforts of all the stakeholders. A single stakeholder, even by inaction, will be able to block most solutions, whether it be Beijing on Darfur or Hamas on Palestine. We have thus entered an era where the only successful global politics will depend on overwhelming cooperative "grand majorities" among nation states and political movements with a multitude of reasons to distrust each other.  

What might religion in general and Catholicism in particular contribute to building trust among such disparate international political actors? The significances of interreligious dialogue and cross-national understandings, especially between the global north and the global south, are obvious. The former demands men and women of considerable spiritual depth and shrewd political craft ("discernment" in the pope's speech). The latter calls for men and women of every nation to orient themselves to the universal human common good and not to narrow nationalist agendas.

The principal importance of today's papal speech to the United Nations is to call all people of good will to answer this challenge in hope. While secularism might have been the better political course for the West following the Thirty Years War, today's incredibly complicated global society can only escape its increasing economic stratification, multiplying civil conflicts, and environmental degradation with increased motivation and participation of all believers. -- Eric O. Hanson is the Donohoe Professor of Political Science at Santa Clara University and author of RELIGION AND POLITICS IN THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM TODAY (Cambridge, 2006). 

The pope offered a vision of a world in which faith can draw the world's peoples and cultures together instead of pushing them apart. Not because all people share a common faith, or even through the common respect for human life and human dignity that underlies all faiths, although the pope also emphasizes that point. But rather through the ways in which religion creates space for dialogue -- dialogue that is itself "the means by which the various components of society can articulate their point of view and build consensus around the truth concerning particular values or goals." As the pope affirmed, in what was for me the most arresting sentence in his speech, "It pertains to the nature of religions, freely practised, that they can autonomously conduct a dialogue of thought and life." In other words, religion, as a holistic system of beliefs, codes of conduct, and the connections that build community, creates a space for thinking and talking about the big questions in life, the life and death issues on which peoples around the world must find at least minimum consensus. It is a space in which people of different faiths feel comfortable meeting, divorced from politics but with results that can influence politics. Across the horizons opened up by their different faiths, believers can develop a common "vision of faith," in the pope's words, that rests on "complete respect for truth, coexistence, rights and reconciliation." If we imagine that space as an institution, it would be the United Religions, bringing together all the diversity of the world's religions to argue and debate and find common ground in support of political action. Compare this vision of the role of religion in the world with dark predictions of a clash of civilizations, of the threat of Islamo-fascism, and of violent schisms within faiths like the divide between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. Pope Benedict is on to something, and what better place to articulate that vision than the United Nations. -- Anne-Marie Slaughter is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and author of THE IDEA THAT IS AMERICA: KEEPING FAITH WITH OUR VALUES IN A DANGEROUS WORLD (Basic Books, 2007).