By IINA,
United Nations : Addressing the UN General Assembly, Pope Benedict XVI urged that human rights “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”. “It is inconceivable 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,” he stressed.
The Pope said the UN embodies the aspiration for a “greater degree of international ordering” inspired and governed by the principles of subsidiary, 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,” he said regrettably in an indirect reference to the superpowers.
He said the UN 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 role, he explained, “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”. On Science, he said notwithstanding the “enormous benefits” that humanity can gain from it, 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. A choice should never be made “between science and ethics, rather it is a question of adopting a scientific method that is truly respectful of ethical imperatives,” he said.
He concluded his speech by greeting the assembly in the UN six languages, including Arabic, saying “Salam wa Izdihar biaoun Allah”.