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Q&A
From the August AD 2004
Our Lady of the Rosary
Parish Bulletin

    Question: Are Catholics required to support the United Nations?  I read an article about James Francis Cardinal Stafford—apparently a spokesman for the Vatican—that seemed to suggest that the UN ought to be in a position to tell all of the nations of the world what to do.[i]  Doesn’t the UN engage in positively immoral activities?

    Answer: The Church is competent to expound God’s moral laws and to exhort their observance, but it is up to civil society to incorporate and enforce those laws in the governments of cities and nations. Even pagan societies are legitimate, at least if the Natural Law is observed. The specific form of government is left to the nations with the expectation that they will govern in conformity with God’s laws. Where the populace is Catholic or generally Christian, it is expected that government will be in accord with Divine Positive Law as well as Natural Law. Governments that govern as though there were no God, or in opposition to God and His Church, seriously compromise their own legitimacy. The reader is directed to the writing of Pope Pius XI in the “Apropos” section of this Bulletin, which considers how the Godless regimes seriously compromise the peace and the general stability of society.

    Those who have read Gaudium et spes will appreciate that the Concilliar Church is less concerned with the Doctrine and the Moral Law than with the way things “ought to be” for man in the modern world. “All things on earth ‘should be’ related to man as their center and crown.”[ii] The “ought to be”s range from very reasonable and urgent things like man “ought to” have food and shelter to much more questionable things like man “ought to” have social life, culture and sports.[iii] For the Church of the Modern World, “ought—to—doxy” often replaces orthodoxy, for in pursuing what “ought to be,” little though is given to the morality of the methods people will follow in the practical world to achieve the “ought to be”s in an economic manner, or in one which pleases the public lust.

    Lists of things that “ought to be” generally do little more than fuel the fires of Utopian Socialism. Few things please central bankers and government bureaucrats more that a list of things to be done by way of public programs. While their programs often deal with almost meaningless abstractions, their practical actions can be quite immoral. Population control is easier than feeding the hungry, sex education is easier than evoking chastity, assisted suicide is perceived to be more “economical” than geriatric care, war can be “good” for the economy, and so on.

    Modernist morality is based on “dialogue”—the fatuous notion that virtually endless rounds of discussions will bring not only consensus, but a change in reality. For the Modernist there is no absolute morality to be found in the mind of God—instead morality is the sum of how the acting persons feel about things. The United Nations Organization is a concrete example of Modernist discourse, a place where the “dialogue” can go on forever without fear that anyone will suggest that God has already revealed His Law.

    But it is important to understand that this particular “dialogue” is particularly dangerous in that it claims sovereignty over the entire Earth, leaving no place on the planet for things to be done apart from the “dialogue”—no place wherein those who disagree can flourish, or even hide. Sovereignty over every people, state and nation—sovereignty over the Catholic Church Itself. Eager to be part of the “dialogue,” the Concilliar Church has been an enthusiastic supporter of this claim. The Concilliar Church’s new Catechism claims, among other such ideas that:

The common good of the human family calls for an organization of society on the international level (CCC1927).

The production and sale of arms affect the common good of nations and the international community. Hence public authorities have the right and the duty to regulate them (CCC2316).

“as long as the danger of war remains and there is no competent and sufficiently powerful authority at the international level, governments cannot be denied the right to legitimate defense....” (CCC2308).

That last sentence is particularly telling, (the concilliarists are quoting their own idea, set forth in Gaudium et spes no. 79) for it calls not only for an armed United Nations, but also for the military disarmament of every other authority in the world! The United Nations Organization, made up in its majority by third world nations, is supposed to have the firepower to control the world! And, note well, the current Security Council system, wherein the World War II victors—The United States, Great Britain, France, and Russia—as well as Communist China—can veto resolutions, is already being called into question. Why should any nation be “more equal” than the others?[iv]

    When the UN charter was signed in 1945, it probably seemed harmless enough to most Catholics. Many then living could remember two horrible world wars, and most would agree that a great deal of talking was preferable to even a tiny war. While the organization was in no way Christian, the egalitarian language and promise of social cooperation seemed harmless enough. It did not appear to threaten the character of those Christian nations that joined. It seemed to be little more than a forum for debate

    The writings of Pius XII, Pope for the first thirteen years of the UN’s existence, do not specifically refer to the organization as such, but refer to “the community of states,” or to “the nations.” They made repeated reference to the fact enunciated by Pope Pius XI that peace and prosperity are not possible in a society which excludes God from its laws and principles. There were repeated calls for prayer to Jesus Christ through the Blessed Virgin Mary, exhortations to charity on behalf of the victims of armed conflict, and requests that the nations return God to His rightful place in the conduct of government.[v]

    Together with his predecessors, Pope Pius XII remained critical of the efforts of the “community of states” to forcefully expel Arab Christians and Moslems from the Holy Land and to impose second class citizenship on those who remained under the secular Zionist state. At least as early as Pope Saint Pius X, the Popes were opposed to this scheme, which took shape first under the Rothschild financiers, then under the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate, and later under the UN partition of Palestine in 1947, and brought to its current state through military terrorism and “pre-emptive” war. Had the Catholic Popes been heeded, the UN would not have fostered this most dangerous threat to world peace. That the UN has been unable to deal with this crisis of its own making suggests that it is not the perfect instrument of peace claimed by its proponents—and certainly not an instrument of the peace of Christ.

    Nor has the UN been particularly effective in other conflicts. Korea would have been over run had not the Soviet Union boycotted the Security Council for a time; UN interference in the war made resolution impossible, leaving roughly two million dead, a much greater number wounded, most industry and about a third of the homes destroyed.[vi] The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 demonstrated that the UN could not be called upon to resist Communist aggression in spite of high sounding talk about “self determination of peoples.” But, quite the opposite, the UN military actions of the early 1960s in the Congo demonstrated a willingness to protect Communist states (the violence has not stopped to this day). The UN has not yet determined whether the fighting in the Sudan is to be classed as “genocide,” although two million people have been killed since 1983.[vii] So much for the UN as a military protector of world peace!

    One used to hear more about Communist infiltration of the UN, but Communism (far from being “dead”) has “reinvented” itself as the Globalism of the New World Order. The UN, of course, is there, doing its part.

    Alphabet soup agencies like UNESCO and UNFPA are much more than forums for debate. Instead, they actively employ the resources of the UN member nations to support abortion and contraception “services” under the guise of “women’s reproductive health” and “sustainable development.” UNFPA even has a strategy for working with liberal Catholic “dissidents” to the moral law in a number of countries.[viii] American involvement in this runs to many millions of dollars, with the government running “hot and cold” on US participation, depending upon the direction of the political wind. Ronald Reagan stood alone as the single reliable Presidential opponent to US contributions to this immorality. But now, as this is being written, Congress is considering a sixty million dollar a year authorization for UNESCO—about one fourth of its operating budget. In many ways, the funded activities of the UN resemble the pipe dreams of 1960s liberals—not surprising in that an enormous number of far left “Non-Governmental Organizations(NGOs)” have some form of advisory status with the UN. On July 1, 2004, the Vatican officially became one of these NGOs, after a forty year unofficial presence.

    “Sustainable development,” biodiversity, and “world heritage sites” sound like something out of the 1960s “Save the Snail-Darter and the Spotted-Owl” movement. But in fact they represent a serious threat to sovereignty of a nation over its own lands.[ix] President Clinton signed the Biodiversity Treaty in 1993, but, happily, the Senate refused to ratify it. The treaty would give the UN the authority to declare huge tracts of a nation’s lands off limits to human activities. According to World Net Daily, “...since the 1970s, the United Nations has designated 47 Biosphere Reserves, 16 Ramsar Wetlands sites, and 20 World Heritage sites on American land. Even fewer people know what those designations mean.[x] If that doesn’t sound significant, it ought to be understood that these designations were unilateral by the UN, without any authorization from Congress!

    The United States have taken an active role in international peacekeeping—sometimes at the request of the UN, and sometimes in spite of the UN. Whatever one may think of America’s international involvements, there are few Americans who want to see our President or our troops liable to prosecution for war crimes by the new UN International Criminal Court. The US refuses to recognize the Court’s jurisdiction and, since the Court’s inception has steadfastly demanded exemption from prosecution. [xi] On the very day that this is being written (June 23^rd AD 2004) the United States found themselves outvoted in the UN Security Council on the issue of continuing immunity to US forces.[xii]

    L.O.S.T! Roughly sixty-five percent of the Earth is covered by water—most of that being in the form of the great oceans which have traditionally been available to those capable of making use of them. The UN’s “Law of the Sea Treaty” (LOST) proposes that the oceans be turned into a socialist collective to regulate all commercial activities and to distribute the proceeds “fairly” among the nations of the world. Like the Biodiversity treaty, the US is a signatory to LOST, and a rather one sided debate takes place now and again in the US Senate with the hope of turning the oceans over to the global government.

    The common thread in all of this is Socialism. The UN has supported the spread of Socialism since its inception, and continues to do so today, now that the International of Communism, the tool of the elite to control the masses, has “morphed” into the Global New World Order. Just before receiving its permanent NGO status, the Vatican’s representative Mary Ann Glendon addressed the UN to place the usual blame for world poverty on the “developed countries, ” ignoring the catastrophic economic and moral effects of globalism and the UN’s own World Bank/IMF.[xiii] Ironically, while recognizing that “globalization has accelerated the disruption of entire ways of life," the president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, seemed oblivious to the nature of her audience. Embracing the re-distribution of wealth, she preached the usual Concilliar Church “ought‑to‑doxy.”

    Given the UN’s track record, the question cannot be whether or not Catholics must support the UN, but whether or not those who do support its anti-Christian practices can remain Catholics at all. That is orthodox Catholics, not the “ought‑to‑dox” imitation of the Concilliar Church.

 “If Socialism, like all errors, contains some truth (which, moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”
---Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo AAnno, #120.

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