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U.N.: sign of unity, instrument of service to the human
family On Friday morning, 18 April [2008], the Holy Father
celebrated Mass in the Nunciature Chapel in Washington before being
driven to Andrews Air Force Base, where he left the city on a flight
bound for New York.
The Pope was welcomed at New York City's John F. Kennedy
International Airport by Cardinal Edward M. Egan, Archbishop of New
York, and Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Permanent Observer of the Holy
See to the United Nations (U.N.), Mayor Michael Bloomberg of new York,
Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn and Bishop William F. Murphy of
Rockville Center, as well as various Civil Authorities.
The Pope was then flown by helicopter to Wall Street Heliport in
Manhattan and was driven to the U.N. Headquarters. The three main
buildings were completed in 1952 and, like embassies, they have
extra-territorial status.
The Pontiff was greeted on arrival by Mr Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary
General, and by Mr Kerim Srgjan, president of the General Assembly.
After a private meeting with the Secretary General, the Pope spoke in
the General Assembly Hall to the Representatives of the member Nations.
The following is the Pontiff's Address.
Mr President,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
As I begin my address to this Assembly, I would like first of all to
express to you, Mr President, my sincere gratitude for your kind words.
My thanks go also to the Secretary-General, Mr Ban Ki-moon, for inviting
me to visit the headquarters of this Organization and for the welcome
that he has extended to me. I greet the Ambassadors and Diplomats from
the Member States, and all those present. Through you, I greet the
peoples who are represented here. They look to this institution to carry
forward the founding inspiration to establish a "centre for harmonizing
the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends" of peace
and development (cf. Charter of the United Nations, article 1.2-1.4). As
Pope John Paul II expressed it in 1995, the Organization should be "a
moral centre where all the nations of the world feel at home and develop
a shared awareness of being, as it were, a 'family of nations'" (Address
to the General Assembly of the United Nations on the 50th Anniversary of
its Foundation, New York, 5 October 1995, 14).
Through the United Nations, States have established universal objectives
which, even if they do not coincide with the total common good of the
human family, undoubtedly represent a fundamental part of that good. The
founding principles of the Organization
—
the desire for peace, the quest for justice, respect for the dignity of
the person, humanitarian cooperation and assistance
—
express the just aspirations of the human spirit, and constitute the
ideals which should underpin international relations. As my predecessors
Paul VI and John Paul II have observed from this very podium, all this
is something that the Catholic Church and the Holy See follow
attentively and with interest, seeing in your activity an example of how
issues and conflicts concerning the world community can be subject to
common regulation. The United Nations embodies the aspiration for a
"greater degree of international ordering" (John Paul II, Sollicitudo
Rei Socialis, 43), inspired and governed by the principle of
subsidiarity, and therefore capable of responding to the demands of the
human family through binding international rules and through structures
capable of harmonizing the day-to-day unfolding of the lives of peoples.
This is all the more necessary at a time when we experience the obvious
paradox of a multilateral consensus that continues to be in crisis
because it is still subordinated to the decisions of a few, whereas the
world's problems call for interventions in the form of collective action
by the international community.
Promote the common good
Indeed, questions of security, development goals, reduction of local and
global inequalities, protection of the environment, of resources and of
the climate, require all international leaders to act jointly and to
show a readiness to work in good faith, respecting the law, and
promoting solidarity with the weakest regions of the planet. I am
thinking especially of those countries in 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. In the context of international relations, 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. These regulations do not limit freedom. On
the contrary, they promote it when they prohibit behaviour and actions
which work against the common good, curb its effective exercise and
hence compromise the dignity of every human person. In the name of
freedom, there has to be a correlation between rights and duties, by
which every person is called to assume responsibility for his or her
choices, made as a consequence of entering into relations with others.
Here our thoughts turn also to the way the results of scientific
research and technological advances have sometimes been applied.
Notwithstanding the enormous benefits that humanity can gain, some
instances of this represent a clear violation of the order of creation,
to the point where not only is the sacred character of life
contradicted, but the human person and the family are robbed of their
natural identity. Likewise, international action to preserve the
environment and to protect various forms of life on earth must not only
guarantee a rational use of technology and science, but must also
rediscover the authentic image of creation. This never requires a choice
to be made between science and ethics: rather it is a question of
adopting a scientific method that is truly respectful of ethical
imperatives.
Recognition of the unity of the human family, and attention to the
innate dignity of every man and woman, today find renewed emphasis in
the principle of the responsibility to protect. This has only recently
been defined, but it was already present implicitly at the origins of
the United Nations, and is now increasingly characteristic of its
activity. Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population
from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the
consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made. If
States are unable to guarantee such protection, the international
community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United
Nations Charter and in other international instruments. 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 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.
Safeguard freedom, dignity
The principle of "responsibility to protect" was considered by the
ancient ius gentium as the foundation of every action taken by those in
government with regard to the governed: at the time when the concept of
national sovereign States was first developing, the Dominican Friar
Francisco de Vitoria, rightly considered as a precursor of the idea of
the United Nations, described this responsibility as an aspect of
natural reason shared by all nations, and the result of an international
order whose task it was to regulate relations between peoples. Now, as
then, this principle has to invoke the idea of the person as image of
the Creator, the desire for the absolute and the essence of freedom. The
founding of the United Nations, as we know, coincided with the profound
upheavals that humanity experienced when reference to the meaning of
transcendence and natural reason was abandoned, and in consequence,
freedom and human dignity were grossly violated. When this happens, it
threatens the objective foundations of the values inspiring and
governing the international order and it undermines the cogent and
inviolable principles formulated and consolidated by the United Nations.
When faced with new and insistent challenges, it is a mistake to fall
back on a pragmatic approach, limited to determining "common ground",
minimal in content and weak in its effect.
This reference to human dignity, which is the foundation and goal of the
responsibility to protect, leads us to the theme we are specifically
focusing upon this year, which marks the sixtieth anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document was the outcome of
a convergence of different religious and cultural traditions, all of
them motivated by the common desire to place the human person at the
heart of institutions, laws and the workings of society, and to consider
the human person essential for the world of culture, religion and
science. Human rights are increasingly being presented as the common
language and the ethical substratum of international relations. At the
same time, the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of human
rights all serve as guarantees safeguarding human dignity. It is
evident, though, that the rights recognized and expounded in the
Declaration 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. This great variety of viewpoints must not be
allowed to obscure the fact that not only rights are universal, but so
too is the human person, the subject of those rights.
Equal rights for peace
The life of the community, both domestically and internationally,
clearly demonstrates that respect for rights, and the guarantees that
follow from them, are measures of the common good that serve to evaluate
the relationship between justice and injustice, development and poverty,
security and conflict. The promotion of human rights remains the most
effective strategy for eliminating inequalities between countries and
social groups, and for increasing security. Indeed, the victims of
hardship and despair, whose human dignity is violated with impunity,
become easy prey to the call to violence, and they can then become
violators of peace. The common good that human rights help to accomplish
cannot, however, be attained merely by applying correct procedures, nor
even less by achieving a balance between competing rights. The merit of
the Universal Declaration is that it has enabled different cultures,
juridical expressions and institutional models to converge around a
fundamental nucleus of values, and hence of rights. Today, though,
efforts need to be redoubled 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 was adopted as a "common standard of achievement" (Preamble)
and 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.
Experience shows that legality often prevails over justice when the
insistence upon rights makes them appear as the exclusive result of
legislative enactments or normative decisions taken by the various
agencies of those in power. When presented purely in terms of legality,
rights risk becoming weak propositions divorced from the ethical and
rational dimension which is their foundation and their goal. The
Universal Declaration, rather, has reinforced the conviction that
respect for human rights is principally rooted in unchanging justice, on
which the binding force of international proclamations is also based.
This aspect is often overlooked when the attempt is made to deprive
rights of their true function in the name of a narrowly utilitarian
perspective. Since rights and the resulting duties follow naturally from
human interaction, it is easy to forget that they are the fruit of a
commonly held sense of justice built primarily upon solidarity among the
members of society, and hence valid at all times and for all peoples.
This intuition was expressed as early as the fifth century by Augustine
of Hippo, one of the masters of our intellectual heritage. He taught
that the saying: Do not do to others what you would not want done to you
"cannot in any way vary according to the different understandings that
have arisen in the world" (De Doctrina Christiana, III, 14). Human
rights, then, must be respected as an expression of justice, and not
merely because they are enforceable through the will of the legislators.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
As history proceeds, new situations arise, and the attempt is made to
link them to new rights. Discernment, that is, the capacity to
distinguish good from evil, becomes even more essential in the context
of demands that concern the very lives and conduct of persons,
communities and peoples. In tackling the theme of rights, since
important situations and profound realities are involved, discernment is
both an indispensable and a fruitful virtue.
Discernment, then, shows that entrusting exclusively to individual
States, with their laws and institutions, the final responsibility to
meet the aspirations of persons, communities and entire peoples, can
sometimes have consequences that exclude the possibility of a social
order respectful of the dignity and rights of the person. On the other
hand, a vision of life firmly anchored in the religious dimension can
help to achieve this, since recognition of the transcendent value of
every man and woman favours conversion of heart, which then leads to a
commitment to resist violence, terrorism and war, and to promote justice
and peace.
Respect Religious freedom
This also provides the proper context for the inter-religious
dialogue that the United Nations is called to support, just as it
supports dialogue in other areas of human activity. Dialogue should be
recognized as 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. It pertains to the nature of
religions, freely practised, that they can autonomously conduct a
dialogue of thought and life. If at this level, too, the religious
sphere is kept separate from political action, then great benefits ensue
for individuals and communities. On the other hand, the United Nations
can count on the results of dialogue between religions, and can draw
fruit from the willingness of believers to place their experiences at
the service of the common good. Their task is to propose a vision of
faith not in terms of intolerance, discrimination and conflict, but in
terms of complete respect for truth, coexistence, rights, and
reconciliation.
Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom,
understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual
and communitarian
— a
vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly
distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the
believer. The activity of the United Nations in recent years has ensured
that public debate gives space to viewpoints inspired by a religious
vision in all its dimensions, including ritual, worship, education,
dissemination of information and the freedom to profess and choose
religion. It is inconceivable, then, that believers should have to
suppress a part of themselves
—
their faith
—
in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God
in order to enjoy one's rights. The rights associated with religion are
all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with
a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an
exclusive nature. The full guarantee of religious liberty cannot be
limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due
consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the
possibility of believers playing their part in building the social
order. Indeed, they actually do so, for example through their
influential and generous involvement in a vast network of initiatives
which extend from Universities, scientific institutions and schools to
health care agencies and charitable organizations in the service of the
poorest and most marginalized. Refusal to recognize the contribution to
society that is rooted in the religious dimension and in the quest for
the Absolute
—
by its nature, expressing communion between persons
—
would effectively privilege an individualistic approach, and would
fragment the unity of the person.
My presence at this Assembly is a sign of esteem for the United Nations,
and it is intended to express the hope that the Organization will
increasingly serve as a sign of unity between States and an instrument
of service to the entire human family. It also demonstrates the
willingness of the Catholic Church to offer her proper contribution to
building international relations in a way that allows every person and
every people to feel they can make a difference. In a manner that is
consistent with her contribution in the ethical and moral sphere and the
free activity of her faithful, the Church also works for the realization
of these goals through the international activity of the Holy See.
Indeed, 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, helps to define that law, and makes appeal to it.
The United Nations remains a privileged setting in which the Church is
committed to contributing her experience "of humanity", developed over
the centuries among peoples of every race and culture, and placing it at
the disposal of all members of the international community. This
experience and activity, directed towards attaining freedom for every
believer, seeks also to increase the protection given to the rights of
the person. Those rights are grounded and shaped by the transcendent
nature of the person, which permits men and women to pursue their
journey of faith and their search for God in this world. Recognition of
this dimension must be strengthened if we are to sustain humanity's hope
for a better world and if we are to create the conditions for peace,
development, cooperation, and guarantee of rights for future
generations.
In my recent Encyclical, Spe Salvi, I indicated that "every generation
has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to
order human affairs" (no. 25). For Christians, this task is motivated by
the hope drawn from the saving work of Jesus Christ. That is why the
Church is happy to be associated with the activity of this distinguished
Organization, charged with the responsibility of promoting peace and
good will throughout the earth. Dear Friends, I thank you for this
opportunity to address you today, and I promise you of the support of my
prayers as you pursue your noble task.
Before I take my leave from this distinguished Assembly, I should like
to offer my greetings, in the official languages, to all the Nations
here represented.
Peace and Prosperity with God's help! [The Holy Father then offered this
greeting in French; Spanish; Arabic; Chinese; and Russian:]
Thank you very much.
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