Internationalist Pope?
by Donald Devine
Issue 107 - May 7, 2008

Was Lou Dobbs right that “the pope is blasting our society; here he is, I guess, in many ways insulting our country, talking about the need to be welcoming, taking up the issue of illegal immigration without any comparison to the rest of the world?” Congressman Tom Tancredo criticized him too. Are conservatives right to be concerned about Benedict XVI’s “welcoming internationalism”?

“Pope calls for multilateral agenda” was one headline describing his United Nations speech. Benedict himself asked Americans to “continue to welcome the immigrants who join your ranks” and for the world to pursue a “greater degree of international ordering" and even that the world community was unable to solve its problems because its consensus views are “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.”

Is the U.S. that “few” that is stifling word progress? President George W. Bush did not think so, calling the pope’s U.N. speech “awesome.” But Fidel Castro praised it too, as the “antithesis” of the Bush policy of “brutality and force.” A former speechwriter for the president, writing for the neocon Wall Street Journal editors, positively cheered that the pope did “nothing close” to criticizing Bush on Iraq, even though Benedict opposed the original invasion. Interestingly, both Castro and the Journal writer noted it was not easy to categorize his message. The “few” may have been the U.N. Security Council rather than the U.S. alone.

While he may have criticized the U.N.’s ruling body, it is clear Benedict thinks collective rather than nation-state action alone is necessary to promote a just world order. On the other hand, he also said that “Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made.” So the nation-state comes first but “If States are unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations Charter and in other international instruments.”

So, Benedict is an internationalist, right, ready to turn control to the U.N.? Indeed, he went further in limiting national sovereignty:

The action of the international community and its institutions, provided that it respects the principles undergirding the international order, should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation of sovereignty. On the contrary, it is indifference or the failure to intervene that do the real damage. What is needed is a deeper search for ways of pre-empting and managing conflicts by exploring every possible diplomatic avenue, and giving attention and encouragement to even the faintest sign of dialogue or desire for reconciliation.

What is that, “provided” the U.N. follows its own and other universal principles of peace and order? Here is what he was actually promoting. Benedict set important limits to international pretensions and actions. He even recognized that the sovereign nation “states have established [the] universal objectives” of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the first place and that it was they who founded the U.N. to honor them. He specifically noted that these U.N. objectives “do not coincide with the total common good of the human family,” although they “undoubtedly represent a fundamental part of that good.” That is, the U.N. Declaration is not a complete statement of human rights and morality but it does have enough of the full natural law to provide a basis for consensual international action.

The total natural law does not come from the international community at all:

It is evident, though, that the rights recognized and expounded in the Declaration apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God's creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks. This great variety of viewpoints must not be allowed to obscure the fact that not only rights are universal, but so too is the human person, the subject of those rights.

The primacy of the individual person, natural law, unalienable rights, creative design?--these ideals actually can be traced to an earlier Declaration acknowledging self evident truths for all peoples that was crafted not so far away from where Benedict spoke. He was too diplomatic to say straight out that the endowment by a Creator required by that Declaration to give the human person value is not a universally accepted basis for agreement nor is natural law. They are not accepted universally, may we be so impolitic to mention, but are regarded as universal mainly from the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Western Civilization that the speaker himself represented? This was even more apparent as he continued:

In the context of international relations, it is necessary to recognize the higher role played by rules and structures that are intrinsically ordered to promote the common good, and therefore to safeguard human freedom. These regulations do not limit freedom. On the contrary, they promote it when they prohibit behavior and actions which work against the common good, curb its effective exercise and hence compromise the dignity of every human person. In the name of freedom, there has to be a correlation between rights and duties, by which every person is called to assume responsibility for his or her choices, made as a consequence of entering into relations with others.

Explicitly bringing freedom, rules and individual responsibility into consideration rounds out his message. The type of institutional structure the pope was describing is what the great Nobel theorist of limited government, F.A. Hayek, called essential to safeguard human freedom--the rule of law. Indeed, this section by the pope about the importance of rules and freedom could have been written by Hayek himself.

But rules by themselves are not sufficient.

Experience shows that legality often prevails over justice when the insistence upon rights makes them appear as the exclusive result of legislative enactments or normative decisions taken by the various agencies of those in power. When presented purely in terms of legality, rights risk becoming weak propositions divorced from the ethical and rational dimension which is their foundation and their goal.

Rights must be based on deep tradition or reason rooted in concrete human nature and sentiments, or as the pope prefers, in both tradition and reason, and even more through “a vision of life firmly anchored in the religious dimension,” which even an agnostic like Hayek cited as the actual historical and cultural source of the public morality necessary for a free society.

To achieve this society, however, “the religious sphere” must be “kept separate from political action,” Benedict demanded. Social freedom is in tension, to be “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” (perhaps a teaching moment for unitary Islam?). He is also concerned about pressure to “move away from the protection of human dignity towards the satisfaction of simple interests, often particular interests”—perhaps a teaching moment for the realist school of foreign relations? Yet, the conservative-realist Sharon Statement always set the American foreign policy goal not to advance national interest alone but to promote the “just” interests of the U.S., recognizing the same need to balance interest with justice.

Benedict even declared an international obligation to care for the environment. But he makes the necessary qualifications, requiring that “international action to preserve the environment and to protect various forms of life on earth must not only guarantee a rational use of technology and science, but must also rediscover the authentic image of creation. This never requires a choice to be made between science and ethics: rather it is a question of adopting a scientific method that is truly respectful of ethical imperatives.” It is in this same context that the pope asked Americans to “continue” to welcome immigrants, because they are people loved by God and as such deserve a degree of protection as a similar moral imperative.

This is a large agenda for an “international community” that conservatives are not even certain exists. There certainly is a United Nations but it is ruled by its Security Council and bureaucracy but it is not clear that Benedict accepts this as the “international community” and, even if he does, he only invests it with diplomatic authority, not force. He requires that it follow fair and accepted rules including its own, obtain a general consensus before action, and respect individual freedom and responsibility. Even the U.N.’s greatest American critic, former ambassador John Bolton, has always maintained there was a proper U.N. role, only he required that limitations similar to those set by the pope be observed by the U.N. and that the U.S. carefully protect its own legitimate interests in the process.

Finally, Benedict limits international power over nation states and other organizations in an even more fundamental way. In the very sentence where he demanded a large international role, he drastically limited that role by requiring that any collective action be “inspired and governed by the principle of subsidiarity.” Subsidiarity is the traditional Catholic moral principle that nothing should be done by a higher level organization that can be done properly by a lower one—the U.N. should not do what a nation state should, the nation state should not do what a regional state can do, a state should not do what a local government should, a government should not do what the private sector can, and neither government nor private organizations should infringe on what associations, family and the individual can do for themselves.

This strong moral limit to the power of international bodies—and to the power and reach of national governments too--changes everything about rule by higher level authorities. Everywhere, even in the better societies today, central governments are reaching out in the name of welfare to reduce individual freedom and responsibility. The demand for subsidiarity is a limit to that nearly universal overreach. To friends of liberty, the restatement of that moral right by this important world leader at the very podium of the United Nations itself was worth the entire visit.

Stressing the primacy of rules and freedom rather than state power forcing morality is an almost revolutionary view these days. Hayek seemed the last major moral voice insisting on the primacy of fair rules to support human rights, freedom and responsibility. Now Benedict has added his own powerful if humble voice, even adding: “The promotion of human rights remains the most effective strategy for eliminating inequalities between countries and social groups, and for increasing security.” Take that Fidel Castro and all his lesser progressive ilk lauding the moral superiority of the government taking and redistributing private property as the better solution to force justice, rather than relying on general rules of fairness to promote human rights as Hayek insisted.

Benedict is an internationalist—after all he is a man for all nations--but one who insists all power is limited by the value of the individual person, “who remains the high-point of God's creative design for the world and for history.”

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.