UNITED STATES
The American Conservative
By JOHN ZMIRAK • February 24, 2014
The healthy human reaction whenever the United Nations says something is to ignore it, and hope that, like a singing drunk outside your window, it will simply go away. The normal Catholic’s reaction to a UN attack on the Church ought to be to rally ’round, to refute the thing point by point, and to lobby Congress to cut off U.S. funding. But after reading the UN’s recent report on the Church and the protection of children’s rights, I simply can’t do that. Not on this topic.
Yes, it’s true that the UN report on the Holy See is an instance of an unaccountable global bureaucracy trying to impose its own views on the free institutions of civil society, using the coercive power of government(s). Inside the velvet glove of happy talk about human dignity and children’s rights is the steel fist of radical feminism and homosexual activism, whose central tenets reject the traditional family, religious freedom, and other goods that reason tells us are essential for man to flourish. The report demands that the Church reach in and revise its Canon Law, its schools, and even its doctrine, wherever the UN sees those things as conflicting with its goals of “gender equality” and the sexual “freedom” of children. This use of the UN’s “soft power” can lead to the use of “hard power,” providing governments the pretext for penalizing the Church and its institutions, as the Obama administration is already doing through the HHS mandate.
The totalitarian implications of a world-wide body imposing its norms across the planet are precisely what worried those of us who criticized Pope Benedict XVI’s call for an international legislative authority that would supervene all national governments on earth—and from which there could be no escape.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.