POPE BENEDICT XVI has offered a couple of recent previews of what\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s budding environmentalism, a reminder of human supremacy over the animal kingdom.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cbitter fruits\u201d\u009d of \u201crelativistic logic\u201d\u009d and a \u201crefusal to admit the truth about man and his dignity.\u201d\u009d 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 \u201cattack\u201d\u009d ahead of next year\u2019s General Assembly address.<\/p>\n
But if the pope\u2019s words have fed expectations of a \u201cHigh Noon\u201d\u009d-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\u2019s only that the Vatican\u2019s public-relations crew still hasn\u2019t found a way to keep the pope from making cosmetic missteps that distract attention from his message.<\/p>\n
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 \u201d\u201d what Pope John Paul II called a \u201cglobalization of solidarity.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Moreover, Benedict undeniably has a point about relativism.<\/p>\n