Bringing Dignity Back to the UN

By Contributor | May 19, 2011

Last Thursday, the Holy See Mission to the UN partnered with the Mission of Poland to host an event on John Paul II and the dignity of the human person, which lightened the oft-oppressive halls of the UN with words of hope about the nature of man and his future.

George Weigel of the Ethics & Public Policy Center spoke about John Paul II’s influence on the political milieu of Europe. John Paul II courageously proclaimed that neither politics nor economics are the driving force of human history – rather, it is a people’s culture, what they cherish and worship, that shapes society. Weigel recalled how John Paul II exhorted his native land, and all people, to reclaim their culture from the false gods of race and class, which were manifested in Fascism and Marxism, and once again put God, and His relationship to man, at its center.

Douglas Farrow, professor of Christian thought at McGill University, spoke on how John Paul II contributed to the common consciousness of the importance of marriage and the family. Highlighting man’s nature as an interpersonal being, he explained John Paul II’s teaching that man’s fullest realization of self comes through self-gift, and thus the family is the first and primary place that man can realize his dignity and value as a human person. As such, it deserves particularly support as society’s most fundamental institution.

Dignity, value, cherish, self-gift – these words are rarely heard at the UN, a fact that is perhaps surprising since so many UN discussions are oriented towards attaining human development and achieving a world of peace and prosperity. Yet to hear them spoken in rooms habitually filled with utilitarian discussions of human life that reduce man to his basest needs and desires reminded the delegates, and the entire audience, that man is not just an organism with needs and urges, but a being with inestimable value, with “the capacity for wisdom and virtue” and the Divine.

These may seem matters beyond the purview of the United Nations. But they are not. The politics of nations … can never ignore the transcendent, spiritual dimension of the human experience, and could never ignore it without harming the cause of man and the cause of human freedom. Whatever diminishes man — whatever shortens the horizon of man’s aspiration to goodness — harms the cause of freedom. In order to recover our hope and our trust …we must regain sight of that transcendent horizon of possibility to which the soul of man aspires. – Address of John Paul II to the United Nations, 1995.

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