World renewal through the United Nations: Unlikely.

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 16, 2025

Last week, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia delivered a statement on human rights at UNGA 80—that is, the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Archbishop Caccia is the Apostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See at the UN. His statement was made not to the whole Assembly but in the Third Committee General Discussion On All Agenda Items, which is a committee of the General Assembly which deals with human rights issues

In other words, this is fairly routine. But Archbishop Caccia’s statement does indicate the difficulty of speaking coherently about human rights in today’s secular environment. Therefore, he began by stating the problem somewhat obliquely:

[Eighty years ago] a consensus was reached on shared values and a multilateral framework for collaborative endeavors to promote them. Notwithstanding the challenges faced from both internal and external sources, these principles continue to underpin multilateralism. True reform is invariably predicated on a return to the foundational principles, accompanied by a perspicacious evaluation of the elements that have demonstrated resilience, those that necessitate reinforcement, and the superfluous additions to the foundational structure that fail to serve its original design and should be excised.

This is simply a fairly neutral way of expressing the fact that the UN began with a reasonably clear understanding of human rights as rooted in human nature, but as modern culture has devolved into moral chaos, all kinds of new “rights” have been invented which are doing far more harm than good because they are not based on a coherent understanding of human nature at all. In the secular environment of the UN, it must generally go without saying that this earlier notion of rights was far more firmly corroborated by Divine Revelation, natural law, and the teachings of the Catholic Church than the largely false notions of human rights which have developed since that time.

After all, as Archbishop Caccia pointed out in his next paragraph, “The roots of human rights are to be found in the God-given dignity that belongs to each human being”, and a proper understanding of rights involves not only freedom but responsibility. Instead, “the Holy See notes that the interpretation of human rights has often been expanded beyond the scope of both law and consensus [so that] “the assertion of new concepts as rights can become an instrument of ideological colonization”. Quoting Pope Francis, Archbishop Caccia made several further comments on the faulty understanding of rights today: Ideas rooted merely in cultural fashion; a concentration on the rights of individuals while neglecting their duties; and, in effect, a contempt for many classes of persons who are “cast aside like dry leaves to be burnt.”

He ended his comments by insisting on the “central role of religious freedom…because it is the litmus test for the respect of all other human rights and fundamental freedoms.” He referred back to the superior understanding of authentic human rights in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. And no wonder: After all, this initial document hewed far more closely to the Christian understanding of human nature professed by the Catholic Church and affirmed by a long and careful classical philosophical tradition—a tradition which was fading but still fairly broadly accepted immediately following World War II.

The Missionary Problem

Unfortunately, and even as obliquely noble as Archbishop Ceccia’s remarks certainly are, their very obliqueness reveals that neither the Vatican delegation nor anyone else is willing to state clearly that the Emperor has no clothes—by which I mean that the modern world no longer recognizes the values which we can derive from both the natural law and Divine Revelation. The chilling reality at this stage is that the strongest proponent of a coherent understanding of human nature—that is, the Catholic Church—is extraordinarily weak in terms of its influence over the world’s understanding of civilization.

Instead, the Christian understanding of the human person has long since disappeared from the dominant cultures of our world today. The result is that no significant political, economic, or social barriers any longer stand in the way of the long series of cultural shifts in favor of ever-deeper human depravities—evil done in the name of good—which is both the ancient and the modern hallmark of diabolical influence.

Now, I do not assert that it is time for the Church to stop playing the frequently futile and even silly games involved in international collaboration. After all, the Church’s delegation to the United Nations is a last vestige of the cultural and even political respect she had earned over two thousand years of human history. And it may well be that the tradition of her involvement in secular international institutions will bear enormous fruit again in the future if the Church dares to reaffirm her missionary purpose—that is, if the Church recovers her sense that she must not so much seek to find common ground in common sense as to come once again to the famous conclusion reached by St. Paul at the very dawn of her existence:

When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. [1 Cor 2:1-5]

The only way forward

It is a fact of our fallen nature and our fallen history that very few cultures attain to a significant understanding of human nature (and so human morality) without the aid of Divine Revelation. In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul put his finger precisely on the problem that everyone devoted to merely human stratagems seems to forget today:

For, “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” .But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men preach unless they are sent?

It remains true that each Catholic has his own call and his own particular task set before him by Christ, and many are obviously called to work for good (and good relations) in the political sphere, but this must not obscure Christ’s admonition that “without me you can do nothing.” The Catholic Church’s most fundamental reality is that Our Lord is the vine and we are the branches, and that only the one who remains in Him produces much fruit (Jn 15:5).

Sweet reason addressing a fallen world in its own language does have its place. But it never has pride of place. Without Christ, we cannot even understand what the peoples of this world really need to live in peace.