Who Will Investigate the U.N. – Vatican Connection?

Pope Benedict XVI gets ready to address the staff of the United Nations in the General Assembly Hall.  United Nations, New York  Date: 18 April 2008  UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

RightSide | Jul 14, 2009

by Cliff Kincaid

The Boston Globe won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for covering the Catholic Church’s decades-long cover-up of priests who sexually abused children. There is a Pulitzer Prize waiting for the reporter who can figure out why the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church, considered by Catholics the personal representative of Jesus Christ, has emerged as an advocate of one of the most corrupt and non-Christian organizations on the face of the earth-the United Nations.

The U.N. has been rocked by scandals involving U.N. “peacekeepers” who sexually abuse women and children, the failure to protect populations in danger of genocide, and financial corruption. It is an anti-American institution founded by a Soviet spy that is currently headed by a Communist Catholic Priest, U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto, who recently gave a speech at a U.N. financial conference on the need to protect “Mother Earth.”

So when the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI, endorsed a “World Political Authority” in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, it was big news that could only be understood in the context of the growing power and influence of the U.N. The timing was also significant. The Papal statement was issued just before a meeting of the G-8 nations, including the U.S., Russia and China, and before the Pope’s meeting with President Barack Obama.

Self-deception

Conservatives who should know better have tried to play down the nature of the Pope’s dangerous proposal. In a July 10 Wall Street Journal article, American Roman Catholic Priest Robert A. Sirico of the conservative Acton Institute ignored the controversial “World Political Authority” passage and wrote that “People seeking a blueprint for the political restructuring of the world economy won’t find it here.”

In fact, the Pope stated that the goals of this World Political Authority should be “To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration…” This is a fairly detailed blueprint that sounds precisely like some of the functions of the U.N.

The Pope went on, “In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth.”

So the “reform” of the U.N. is designed to strengthen it. Hence, the U.N. is clearly destined, from the Vatican point of view, to become the World Political Authority.

Pope Benedict XVI blesses the UN flag

On the July 10 edition of “The World Over” program on global Catholic television network EWTN, Sirico said that he was confident that the Pope was “not calling for a central government bureaucracy.” But the host, Raymond Arroyo, was unclear how a World Political Authority was compatible with the Pope’s commitment in the same encyclical to “subsidiarity,” a form of local control. “They seem to be in conflict,” Arroyo said. In fact, as the Pope himself warned, the World Political Authority could become “tyrannical” in nature.

The Precedent

The exact quote from the Papal statement, a major teaching document of the Roman Catholic Church, was that “there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago.” Pope John XXIII declared in his April 11, 1963, encyclical, Pacem in Terris, “Today the universal common good presents us with problems which are world-wide in their dimensions; problems, therefore, which cannot be solved except by a public authority with power, organization and means co-extensive with these problems, and with a world-wide sphere of activity. Consequently the moral order itself demands the establishment of some such general form of public authority. But this general authority equipped with world-wide power and adequate means for achieving the universal common good cannot be imposed by force. It must be set up with the consent of all nations. If its work is to be effective, it must operate with fairness, absolute impartiality, and with dedication to the common good of all peoples.”

He added that “It is therefore our earnest wish that the United Nations Organization may be able progressively to adapt its structure and methods of operation to the magnitude and nobility of its tasks.”

If the Pope had endorsed just a “World Authority,” some Christians might have considered it a reference to the return of Christ to earth. But the use of the term “political” puts the Pope squarely on the side of those promoting a world government of some kind. And his references to the U.N. clear up any possible doubt as to his intention.

John Zmirak, the writer-in-residence at Thomas More College, a Catholic Institution in New Hampshire, recognizes the obvious danger. He writes that the World Political Authority could become a global “super-state” and persecute the Catholic Church. He explains, “I know that the pope suffered deeply, and personally, from the sick excesses of nationalism. Perhaps if I’d been drafted into the Hitler Youth, and seen my nation ruined and dishonored by a cancerous tribal cult like National Socialism, I might also daydream about a universal benevolent State. But there’s only one thing worse than a national bureaucratic tyranny-and that’s an international one. A reading of Orwell’s 1984 might have reminded Benedict that centralization rarely leads to liberty. And a world-state administered by the kind of people who currently get involved in supranational organizations like the EU and the UN would make its first order of business the liquidation of the Church-which wouldn’t even have a Liechtenstein where it could hide.”

George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, is alarmed as well but blames the World Political Authority reference on the Vatican agency known as the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace. He writes that “It is one of the enduring mysteries of the Catholic Church why the Roman Curia places such faith in this fantasy of a ‘world public authority,’ given the Holy See’s experience in battling for life, religious freedom, and elementary decency at the United Nations. But that is how they think at Justice and Peace, where evidence, experience, and the canons of Christian realism sometimes seem of little account.”

But what is behind this “mystery,” as Weigel calls it?

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