As the days unfolded my entire arsenal proved useless. A few things happened that disarmed me and, perhaps, disappointed others. In a sense, Benedict did nothing wrong. Even more surprising, he did many things even better than well. The group I serve, an “elite” university that has no church relationship, let me know from the outset that they were happy with what was happening, especially the undergraduates.

When the pope raised the issue of the sexual abuse scandal on the plane from Rome, he opened a door that had been opened before, but incorrectly so. That he gave a “press conference” on board Shepherd One was itself a rare interaction with reporters and their questions. His remarks throughout the visit about this painful issue demonstrated an understanding that most of us felt no Vatican official had, and he made it clear — often in carefully veiled ecclesiastical language that the clergy, at least, understood — that the irresponsibility was over. Benedict’s agreeing with Cardinal George of Chicago, when he publicly blamed the bishops for their handling of the issue, was his way of saying that this was his position too, and he was not happy. He made it clear to all that the blame had to be accepted and the pain of the victims had to be spoken of as a public sin rather than a financial crisis. In meeting and praying with a representative group of victims, he offered an example that I believe the bishops should follow. While some of them have already tried to make peace, many have not. The Holy Father told the bishops particularly to get to work. The on-campus response to these gestures and statements was hooray for the pope!

Benedict’s avoidance of the issues of a married clergy or the ordination of women may have disappointed many, but what delighted some, including me, was his studious avoidance of unnecessarily insensitive gender language. He consistently tried to be inclusive in areas where he had genuine control and, if one were to go back and listen to the other speakers representing the church, they did the same. In church settings those things simply do not “happen” on their own.

The student reaction? Again, hooray for the pope. One Stanford student wrote in a blog meant for Catholic students who gather to say the Rosary together: Isn’t our pope cool? The only event that was not clearly open to women was his address to the priests and bishops. On every other occasion women were given high visibility and, as far as I can tell, complete access.

The issue of Christian/Muslim relations was one that caused me great worry. My university has a large Muslim population, and we work very hard to build a genuine community of friendship and intelligent cooperation and dialogue. The same is true for the Jewish community on campus. Benedict seemed to recognize the need to make clear his own position is one favoring this intelligent and peaceful dialogue, and he challenged all Catholics to do the same. Again, the student response to a person was positive. The pope told every Catholic, those who think him wonderful as well as those who still hold legitimate suspicions about the old “hound of orthodoxy,” that this dialogue is the only way to genuine peace and that it is our duty to do whatever is necessary to make peace and not war.

I believe the pope also took issue in his own way with the various policies of the United States that allow for domination by the rich and powerful and for unilateral behavior and unfriendly attitudes toward the United Nations. This happened in virtually every public utterance that was focused on what we would call politics. He raised the issue when he was at the White House, in his address to the United Nations, in his references during both liturgical events, and in other venues. He even made modest though clear references as he was leaving the country.

My final comment has to do with liturgy. Nothing has divided the American Catholic Church more than the liturgy. Benedict said nothing about proper celebrations. Instead, he demonstrated that there is a time and place for everything and for every musical and liturgical tradition. He seemed to me to be as comfortable gently enjoying the very classical expressions of music and ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Yankee Stadium as he was at the youth events at St. Joseph Seminary in Yonkers. He tried, I believe, to remind us that the most important things are not liturgical norms. Rather, we should come together and worship and celebrate the presence of God in word, sacrament, and service. That was his spoken and unspoken message.

The student response, again, was one of happy acceptance of Benedict’s way of teaching. He also made sure that at no time was the moment about himself. In stark contrast to Pope John Paul II, the consummate performer, Benedict established a collegial way of dealing with the bishops and a manner of speaking that placed the focus on Jesus and his message of hope rather than on himself as the messenger. With John Paul II it was always the messenger first and the message as an afterthought.

One young woman responded, in an interview, when it was pointed out that she was cheering for Benedict one moment and living her life with little or no reference to his teaching the next: “He has his right to his opinions.” Benedict knew this and taught rather than entertained. The students demonstrated just as much love for him as they did for the last pope, but with a higher level of understanding of the difference between the teacher and the teaching.

There was much more I would like to have seen, but when I view the entire event realistically, it was just six days, and dozens of times when he was stage-center, and he is 81 years old. This will not be his last visit to the U.S., and he will continue to demonstrate his understanding of the U.S. Catholic Church as he appoints bishops to serve the people. We are truly blessed on the West Coast with a series of episcopal appointments that insure the future health and growth of the church in all of its parts.

By making no mistakes Benedict may have been a disappointment to some on all sides of the religious and political scene. But for the majority of students Benedict was a hit, and in July he will be meeting thousands of them again in Sydney for World Youth Day.

–Fr. Patrick LaBelle, O.P. is director of the Catholic Community at Stanford University.

The pope’s principal subject was the basis in natural law and in faith for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That the pope endorsed the declaration seemed beyond serious dispute, and yet his remarks were studded with dark and baffling little hints. Repeatedly, the audience was virtually forced to read between the papal lines. But just what was written there seemed often anybody’s guess.

When, for example, the pope said early in his address that “a greater degree of international ordering” was necessary because of “the obvious paradox that a multilateral consensus…is still subordinated to the decisions of a few,” to what or whom did he refer? Did he perhaps allude to the subordination of the General Assembly to the five-member Security Council? If not to this, then perhaps to the subordination of the Rest to the West?

The audience could only speculate. An ungenerous auditor might, of course, have asked sotto voce whether the subordination of the many to the few (and of the few to the one) had been good for the Catholic Church itself. But that would have been a mere grouse, and in any case other, more topical riddles lay ahead.

Thus, when the pope said that “not only is the sacred character of life contradicted” by some applications of scientific research “but the human person and the family are robbed of their natural identity,” did he allude, in the 40th anniversary year of the anti-contraception encyclical Humanae vitae, to the birth control pill? The Vatican still regards all forms of artificial birth control as degrading, unnatural, and gravely sinful. But if it was not to this alleged abuse of science that the pope refers, then to what other one? Stem cell research, perhaps? Or something in another ethically charged scientific realm altogether? Again, the General Assembly could only guess.

As for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, his main subject, the pope argued that human rights are based on natural law rather than on any statutory law. Failing to recognize this about human rights, he said, 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.”

But in thus speaking against diversity (and relativism) and in favor of uniformity (and absolutism) regarding human rights, did Benedict mean to speak of or, tacitly, against current practice in certain Muslim-majority countries? A number of those countries, with Saudi Arabia in the lead, were reluctant to sign the declaration when it was proposed sixty years ago, arguing that it was parochially Western rather than truly universal. Are we then to understand that it is from some unnamed Muslim quarter that there has arisen the “pressure to compromise [the declaration's] inner unity” to which the pope alludes? One recalls that Benedict once cautioned against the admission of Turkey to the European Union. What he means to imply here, once again, one can only wonder.

From his premise that human rights are innate rather than legally conferred, the pope derived in his U.N. address a “responsibility to protect” against “grave and sustained” violations of those rights. When such a violation occurs, he maintained: “The action of the international community and its institutions, provided that it respects the principles undergirding the international order, should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation of sovereignty. On the contrary, it is indifference or failure to intervene that do (sic) the real damage. What is needed is a deeper search for ways of pre-empting and managing conflicts by exploring every possible diplomatic avenue, and giving attention and encouragement to even the faintest sign of dialogue or desire for reconciliation.”

Here, did the pope intend a veiled endorsement of the Bush Administration’s armed intervention in Iraq? Would failure to intervene in Iraq have been the real crime? One recalls that while still prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger tilted against John Kerry — the Catholic, relatively antiwar Democratic candidate in the 2004 presidential election — by quietly encouraging American bishops to deny communion to him over the abortion issue. And yet the U.N. audience could as easily infer from the pope’s Delphic remarks a condemnation of the Bush Administration for not “giving attention and encouragement to even the faintest sign of dialogue.” And then again, perhaps the pope was not alluding to Iraq at all but to Sudan and the genocide that continues unchecked in Darfur. Was Saddam Hussein worse in 2003 than Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir is in 2008? If the world intervenes to save Darfur from al-Bashir’s janjaweed, should it confine its intervention to attentive diplomacy, or should it muster an army? One may grant that this speech called for an enunciation of general principles rather than recommendations about particular world crises. And yet when these general principles are so suggestively and yet so guardedly phrased, they can only invite the frustration of what an earlier era called Kremlinology.

When the focus is kept deliberately blurry, the frame can begin to matter more than the picture. After the pope had been received at the White House, my younger brother sent me an email: Am I the only person who thinks that giving the pope a 21-gun salute is completely absurd? Would you give one to Gandhi? With all due respect to the crusades, isn’t this completely missing the point?

Though I shared my brother’s inner cringe as the guns went off, the 21-gun salute was merely what was owed the pope as a head of state. And His Holiness clearly remains attached to his position as the chief executive of a state recognized as such under international law. “Indeed,” he told the General Assembly, “the Holy See has always had a place at the assemblies of the nations, thereby manifesting its specific character as a subject in the international domain. As the United Nations recently confirmed, the Holy See thereby makes its contribution according to the dispositions of international law….”

One of the early actions of John Paul II was to force the resignation of Father Robert Drinan, S.J., from the U.S. Congress. What position would Benedict, the late pope’s close collaborator and successor, take regarding some future priest-lawyer elected to office in the assemblies of [the American] nation? Whatever the answer, the pontiff’s assertion of his own right to speak as a legitimate participant in the deliberation of the United Nations rather than as a mere observer was perhaps the clearest assertion in his entire address.

And thereon hangs an inconvenient tale, for the 21-gun salute lends an unfortunate bit of theatrical credibility to the claim made by salafi terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad — the mastermind of 9/11, whose hit list included, portentously, both Bill Clinton and John Paul II — that Washington, the United Nations, and the Vatican constitute a united front of “Crusaders” against Islam. Through the Vatican state, as Muslims occasionally point out, Christianity has a seat in the General Assembly. Islam, as such, does not. The implication of the difference, at least for some Muslims, seems unmistakable: The “international community” is simply Christendom cosmetically secularized with its inveterate hostility to Islam intact. It would certainly seem, given the lightning speed with which a perceived slur against Islam by Benedict XVI recently flashed around the world, that Muslims pore over his words these days a good deal more than most do in the West.

This state of affairs seems unlikely to change during the pontificate of Benedict XVI if his attachment to the glazed sententiousness of the papal rhetorical tradition and his caution before even the most burning issues of the day remain unchanged. Albert Camus, in one of the essays collected in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, recalls candidly how during World War II the French Resistance hoped for daring on the part of Pius XII. Camus, an unbeliever and a virtual connoisseur of authenticity, would not allow himself to invoke Christian principles to the wartime pope. But he was more than willing to invoke the common human principles that the current pope invokes in his U.N. address. Camus dared to hope that Pius would risk all, even the treasures of the Vatican and St. Peter’s itself, in a passionate, prophetic condemnation of the Third Reich. Had that happened, had Pius risked all and then lost, materially, had St. Peter’s been bombed, had he himself been arrested or even martyred, imagine the moral pinnacle from which his successor would speak today!

At the present juncture, the comparable moral crisis is the world ecological crisis, including global warming but including, as well, a set of almost equally dire threats to the human habitat: the water crisis, the deforestation crisis, the imminent crash of the ocean fisheries, and so on down the list. This is a crisis that almost certainly cannot be surmounted by political or scientific leadership alone, or even by artistic creativity and technical innovation alone. All these will be necessary, but in addition there will be need of a two-part religious strategy. The first part will be the active, evangelistic preaching of asceticism for the sake of human survival. The developed world is going to have to learn to live with less and to make such living an ideal rather than, as now, a virtual disgrace. The second part of the strategy will be a religiously grounded and propagated world policy of population limitation, including a range of measures that, until now, the papacy has consistently condemned.

The conjunction of these two — a call to revive ascetic simplicity in the hallowed Catholic tradition, on the one hand, and, on the other, a dramatic reversal of the Vatican’s opposition to any and all forms of artificial birth control — would be the equivalent in 2008 of what Camus awaited in 1942. Such a moment of metanoia and prophetic fire may yet come for a future pope, but one is forced to conclude, after this pope’s meticulously muted speech to the United Nations, that it will not come for him.

– Jack Miles is distinguished professor of English and religious studies at the University of California at Irvine and general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Religions (forthcoming).

Ah, another day inside the efficient world of Pope Benedict XVI. The pope was, in fact, a half hour early to the cultural center. His speech, though typically intricate and dense, was delivered swiftly enough for none of the 150 members of the audience representing five faiths to get too antsy. Put another way, as Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore later said, Benedict was like the cardinal’s own mother, “sweet, but clear.”

Benedict’s clear message was that interfaith dialogue must go right to the heart of theological differences if it is to lead anywhere: “Religious freedom, interreligious dialogue, and faith-based education aim at something more than a consensus regarding ways to implement practical strategies for advancing peace. The broader purpose of dialogue is to discovery the truth. What is the origin and destiny of mankind? What are good and evil? What awaits us at the end of our earthly existence? Only by addressing these deeper questions can we build a solid basis for the peace and security of the human family.”

The group responded with polite applause, but it seemed the pope was not suggesting they begin such a dialogue immediately. That certainly would not have had the rabbi back to his hotel early.

Instead, young representatives of the Jewish faith, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains presented ceremonial gifts — a menorah, a Qur’an, a bell, an incense burner, and a metallic cube symbolizing Jain principles — and received commemorative gold Vatican coins emblazoned with Benedict’s profile in return. The pope had to go home without a Sikh gift since representatives of that faith had declined the offer to meet the pope when the Secret Service barred them from wearing their traditional and sacred kirpans or swords anywhere near the pontiff.

Several hand-selected representatives of the different faiths approached Benedict for a series of grip-and-grin photos. The Muslim leaders in that group later said they urged the pope to open more lines of communication between Catholics and Muslims.

After the public portion of the ceremony, the pope delivered a Passover message to the Jewish members of the group in a separate room. For those left behind, Dr. Sayyid Syeed, secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America, commandeered the microphone and asked the audience to come forward and offer what they had said to the pope, or what they would say if given the chance. Several Muslims spoke about urging Benedict to follow up on dialogue. Asked later if Muslims had been put off by Benedict’s private session with Jews but not Muslims, founding director of the Institute on Religion and Civic Values Shabbir Mansuri said they had not. “My reading of it is that this is him acknowledging the importance of the relationship between Christians and Jews. By doing that, I think he respects us all.”

Back at the microphone, one man in a dark tunic took a place at the end of the line. When it came time for him to speak, he was alone at the front of the room. He introduced himself as Rinchen Dharlo, a Buddhist from Tibet and president of the Tibet Fund. He said if he had had a chance to speak with Benedict he would have said, “My people are passing through a difficult period.” He went on to describe the beatings and torture his fellow Tibetans have been suffering with the Chinese crackdown on Tibetan calls for autonomy. He said, as much to the room as to the already departed pope, “Remember Tibet in your prayers.” The audience erupted in loud applause.

By then the pope had been ushered out the door, and the rest of the group was free to leave as well. After a long day of shuttles and security checks and waiting, they were eager to leave. The interfaith dialogue they had come to celebrate would have to be continued.

– Janice D’Arcy, religion news associate producer, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

• 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.

– Gerald O’Collins, S.J. is professor emeritus of the Gregorian University in Rome.

UN Photo/Mark Garten

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).

UN Photo/Mark Garten

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).