POPE BENEDICT XVI has offered a couple of recent previews of what’s likely to be his core message to the United Nations next April, the projected highlight of his first visit to the United States. Last Tuesday, the pontiff released the text of his annual statement for the Vatican’s World Day of Peace, raising typical papal concerns like poverty and disarmament, but also a defense of the family based on heterosexual marriage and, in the section reflecting Benedict’s budding environmentalism, a reminder of human supremacy over the animal kingdom.
Ten days earlier in Rome, Pope Benedict offered a more targeted message in a meeting with Catholic nongovernmental groups that work with the United Nations, delivering a stern warning against the “bitter fruits” of “relativistic logic” and a “refusal to admit the truth about man and his dignity.” Given the titanic battles the Vatican has waged against certain United Nations agencies over abortion and birth control, his comments were quickly spun by the Italian press as a major papal “attack” ahead of next year’s General Assembly address.
But if the pope’s words have fed expectations of a “High Noon”-style showdown, they are likely to be dashed. Benedict had no intention of making an anti-United Nations jeremiad. Like every pope since the birth of the United Nations in 1945, Benedict supports robust global governance, in a fashion that has long bewildered neoconservative critics of the United Nations in the United States and elsewhere. If there was anything remarkable in what he said, it’s only that the Vatican’s public-relations crew still hasn’t found a way to keep the pope from making cosmetic missteps that distract attention from his message.
While the Vatican may have its differences with United Nations agencies over sex, it also sees the organization as the lone realistic possibility for putting a human face on international politics and economics ”” what Pope John Paul II called a “globalization of solidarity.”
Moreover, Benedict undeniably has a point about relativism.
Let’s see…
* (borrowing from another posting) – a fairly minor aspect of the presidential race – on the Republican side of the equation – is a “Holy War”.
*The pope saying the things one expects the pope to say about abortion and marraige is leading up to a a major papal “attack†, a “High Noon”-style showdown, or a jeremiad.
*The Vatican PR folks are to blame for the media’s preference for “cosmetic missteps” over substance”.
* Three instances where the pope tried to make serious points which led to major temper tantrums by inferior minds, but the pope takes the blame for their despicable behavior.
A pattern emerges in the reporting that feeds what passes for a mind in western culture, and the pattern isn’t pretty.
[blockquote] A pattern emerges in the reporting that feeds what passes for a mind in western culture, and the pattern isn’t pretty.[/blockquote]
Amen!