Revisiting Pope Paul VI’s 1965 Address to the United Nations
Sept. 19—On October 4, 1965, Pope Paul VI addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations, the first Pope to ever do so. Sixty years later, his speech continues to have relevance in the troubled world of today.
“Never again one against the other, never, never again!” the Pope said. “Was not this the very end for which the United Nations came into existence: to be against war and for peace? Listen to the clear words of a great man who is no longer with us, John Kennedy, who proclaimed four years ago: ‘Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.’”
The Pope spoke of a proper, dignified basis for relationships among nations, referring to “the great principle that relationships between nations must be regulated by reason, justice, law and negotiation, and not by force, violence, war, nor indeed by fear and deceit.”
Speaking to the sacred nature of human life, and in contradiction to the anti-growth, anti-human population expansion policies gaining ascendancy at the time, Pope Paul said, "Your task is so to act that there will be enough bread at the table of mankind and not to support an artificial birth control that would be irrational, with the aim of reducing the number of those sharing in the banquet of life.
“But it is not enough to feed the hungry. Each man must also be assured a life in keeping with his dignity.”
Speaking of the quotation from the prophet Isaiah, “They shall beat their swords into pruning-hooks,” which is the subject of the famous sculpture by Evgeniy Vuchetich at the UN headquarters in New York City, the Pope urged that humanity employ "the prodigious forces of the earth and the magnificent inventions of science no longer as instruments of death, but as instruments of life for the new era of mankind...
“The hour has come when a pause, a moment of recollection, reflection, you might say of prayer, is absolutely needed so that we may think back over our common origin, our history, our common destiny,” he said, adding that the dangers confronting the world are not caused by progress or science: “If these are used well they can, on the contrary, [they] help to solve a great number of the serious problems besetting mankind.”
“The real danger comes from man, who has at his disposal ever more powerful instruments that are as well fitted to bring about ruin as they are to achieve lofty conquests,” the Pope warned.
The world being formed must have a cultural and spiritual basis, for otherwise, it “would rest on purely material and terrestrial foundations.” Indeed, “It rests most of all upon consciences.”