United Nations Helps Dispel Darkness of Unrestrained Ambitions, Selfishness, Pope Francis Tells General Assembly, as Seventieth Session Gets Under Way
The achievements of the United Nations in the past 70 years were lights which helped to dispel the darkness of the disorder caused by unrestrained ambitions and collective forms of selfishness, said Pope Francis today, in a historic address to the General Assembly.
Reaffirming the esteem of the Catholic Church for the Organization, he emphasized that, without the United Nations, mankind would not have been able to survive “the unchecked use of its own possibilities”. Pope Francis is the fourth Pope to address the General Assembly and the first to speak at its opening.
Justice underpinned the United Nations’ founding principles, he said, recalling the classic definition of justice, “to give to each his own”. That meant no human individual or group could consider itself absolute. In contrast to “false rights” stemming from abuse of power, a true “right of the environment” did exist. Across religions, the environment was a fundamental good. According to Christianity and other monotheistic religions, while man was permitted to use creation for the good of his fellow men, he was not authorized to abuse it.
The destruction of the environment was accompanied by a relentless process of exclusion, he added. The poorest suffered the most because they were cast off by society, forced to live off of what was discarded and suffered unjustly from the abuse of the environment. They were part of today’s widespread and quietly growing “culture of waste”. Calling for greater equity in the Organization’s decision-making, he said that international financial institutions must not subject countries to oppressive lending systems which generated greater poverty.
Expressing hope in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Change Conference, he stressed that solemn commitments were not enough. “We must avoid every temptation to fall into a declarationist nominalism, which would assuage our consciences,” he added. Instead of resting content with the bureaucratic exercise of drawing up long lists or thinking that a single solution would provide an answer to all the challenges, the international community must remember the “real men and women who live, struggle and suffer, and are often forced to live in great poverty, deprived of all rights,” he said.
To enable men and women to escape from extreme poverty, he said, they must be allowed to be dignified agents of their own destiny. That required the right to education. Also necessary was to respect the primary right of the family to educate its children. At the same time, Government leaders must do everything possible to ensure the absolute minimum for all: lodging, labour, land and spiritual freedom.
“War is the negation of all rights and a dramatic assault on the environment,” Pope Francis said, stressing the urgent need to work for a world free of nuclear weapons lest the United Nations end up as “nations united by fear and distrust”. Regretting the negative effects of uncoordinated military and political interventions, he renewed his appeals for resolution of the “painful situation of the entire Middle East, North Africa and other African countries”, where Christians, with other cultural or ethnic groups, had witnessed the destruction of their cultural and religious heritage, houses and property.
Human beings, he said, must take precedence over partisan interests in every situation of conflict. Further, there was another kind of conflict — “a war which was taken for granted and poorly fought”. Silently killing millions of people, drug trafficking was accompanied by trafficking in persons, money-laundering, the arms trade, child exploitation and other forms of corruption.
Promising the Assembly his support and his prayers, and calling for respect for the sacredness of every human life, “of every man and every woman, the poor, the elderly, children, the infirm, the unborn, the unemployed, the abandoned, those considered disposable because they are only considered as part of a statistic”, Pope Francis urged delegates to set aside partisan and ideological interests so that the Organization could become the pledge of a secure and happy future for future generations.
Prior to the Pope’s address, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed him to the “pulpit of the world” and thanked him for making history by addressing the General Assembly at its opening. It was also the first time in Papal history that the Head of the Catholic Church had addressed such an array of world leaders. The General Assembly chamber was a “sacred space”, Mr. Ban said, noting that in no other hall could a world leader speak to all humanity.
“You are at home, not in palaces, but among the poor; not with the famous, but with the forgotten; not in official portraits, but in ‘selfies’ with young people,” he said of the Pope, adding that his commitment to compassion for the world’s refugees and migrants, lifting up struggling families and shutting down modern-day slavery.
It was not a coincidence, Mr. Ban added, that the Pope’s visit was concurrent with the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable development. The Pope had spoken often of “integral ecology”, encompassing the environment, economic growth, social justice, and human well-being. The recent Papal Encyclical had defined climate change as a moral issue. Across the global agenda, the Pope was a resounding voice of conscience.
Also welcoming the Pope was General Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft (Denmark), who said that, as Head of the Roman Catholic Church and as a defender of human dignity and the planet’s life-support systems, the Pope had spoken directly to the United Nations’ three pillars. The Pope’s message about the inseparable bond between concern for nature, justice for the poor and commitment to society, and peace was at the heart of the new 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development
Calling on the international community to find the wisdom and courage to adopt an ambitious climate agreement in two months’ time, he added that similar urgency and unity were required to bring an end to the conflicts and violent extremism that affected many parts of the world today. To date, the international community’s collective response to those crises had been, “at best, inadequate, and at worst, a failure of our humanity”. The Assembly must address those crises with leadership and action, in the spirit of solidarity, dialogue and tolerance.