POPE BENEDICT XVI GIVES GOOD SERMON ON HUMAN RIGHTS TO THE U.N.
Text of pope to U.N. General Assembly
Posted on April 18, 2008 by Jim Lackey

Does this mean sectarian fundamentalist Catholics will no longer
persecute non-sectarian Gnostics? Jesus died trying to bring you the
True Gnosis of what "Om" really means, which is the non-
sectarian "Marriage Supper of the Lamb of God".

This Gnosis continues to be rejected without any investigation
whatsoever, while its Messengers are unduly persecuted for their
efforts to help all deluded mankind escape the trap of its own
making. God bless Pope Benedict. Jai Om.- Sw. Tantrasangha
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Here is the prepared text as released by the Vatican of Pope
Benedict's address to the U.N. General Assembly this morning:

[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!