What the United Nations really needs to hear

After the rants by Iran’s president Ahmadinejad and Venezuala’s Chavez, I was wishing the Pope could get in there and calm the place down with his universal wisdom and charity. Seems he finally has, so to speak.

The address of Benedict XVI has reached the United Nations. During a speech delivered yesterday evening at the UN General Assembly, Msgr Giovanni Lajolo specified that the pope condemned “religious motivations for violence”, but also attempts by politicians to “exclude God” from a society “relegating religion to the ambit of subcultures”.

That certainly applies across the spectrum covered at the United Nations, including the current climate in the United States in an election season in which religious values are at the heart of legislation and debate. But Lajolo proceeded from there into a broader reach.

The lecture delivered by the pope at the German university, continued the Vatican’s former minister for foreign affairs, was intended to be a “boost and an encouragement for positive and even self-critical dialogue, both between religions and between modern reason and the faith of Christians”. Beyond the misinterpretations that came about, the pope’s “real intention” was to explain that “‘not religion and violence, but religion and reason go together’, in the context of a critical vision of a society which seeks to exclude God from public life”.

Mgr Lajolo said: “If, on the one hand, religious motivation for violence, whatever its source, must be clearly and radically rejected, on the other, it must be emphasized that in political life one cannot disregard the contribution of the religious vision of the world and of humanity.”

Great message. It needs to be parsed apart in some of those pundit roundtables that kick around political issues in the current campaigns. Lajolo should be on some of these news teams as a contributor. He focuses the lens well.

While the whole world could talk only about friction in the Muslim world after the Regensburg address, nothing was said about the fact that “the Holy Father, in defending the openness of political and cultural activity to the Transcendent, did not wish to do anything other than make a decisive contribution to the dialogue between cultures, by helping to open western thought to the riches of the patrimony of all religions.”

And then he turned attention to the work of the UN. Thankfully.

The speech of Msgr Lajolo also focused on other themes like peace, under development and the promotion of human rights. He said “the Holy See continues to be an advocate of the United Nations and favours its ongoing reform” to make its organisms more effective.

 Did anybody at the UN take note of that call for reform?

“Too often, international bodies act, if at all, only after war is under way or when innocent populations have long been under assault.” “Suitable means” to “intervene in a timely manner” are needed “when the rights of whole groups of people are violated…or when they go unprotected by their own governments”.

Actually, fundamental rights were the centerpiece of this address.

Consistent mention was made throughout the speech of protection of human rights as “an essential pillar in the edifice of world peace”. The Holy See, said Mgr Lajolo, regards the promotion of human rights as one of the United Nations’ primary forms of service to the world.

And they mean authentic, inherent human rights, not those creatively defined by UN groups pushing contraception and abortion as part of the charter and program.

Msgr Lajolo mentioned three fundamental human rights:  the right to life, from the very beginning to its natural end; the right to religious freedom; the right to freedom of thought and expression. Alas, he said, these three values in particular are not adequately protected in every nation. “In not a few, they are openly denied, even among States sitting on the Human Rights Council”, the new organism launched by the United Nations.

Exactly. Now, where’s that applause so generously offered Ahmadinejad and Chavez? This one, Lajolo, deserves a standing ovation.