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Saint Vincent de Paul
Roman Catholic Church
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Bayonne, New Jersey 07002
(201) 436-2222 Fax:(201) 437-5235
Founded 1894
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[Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults] [Pope Benedict XVI]
  Pope
Benedict XVI
Apostolic Journey to the United States
April 15 - 20, 2008
Prepared text as released by the Vatican of
the Pope Benedict's speech to the United Nations' General Assembly April
18, 2008:
English version
[In French] 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.
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.
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.
[In English]
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. 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.
[in English; in French; in Spanish; in Arab; in Chinese; in Russian:]
Peace and Prosperity with God's help! |