As I was careful to say in my first post, _Caritas in Veritate_ suggests the NEED for a reformed UN AND economic institutions AND international finance.
>>> If I were the pope, I wouldn’t put much hope in seeing a really reformed UN.
But then, I’m not the pope. He’s the expert on hope. (Not hope and change—the Church develops but does not change.) <<<
Ah, so in your view Pope BXVI is the expert on “fruitless hopes.” That’s a pretty insulting thing to suggest.
>>> But the pope did not write about the present UN. He wrote about a reformed UN. <<<
No, he wrote about the NEED for a reformed UN AND economic institutions AND international finance. Reformed enough to do the Herculean (and toothy!) labors that need to be done to realize the ideal of a family of nations.
>>> If there ever were a truly reformed UN along the lines outlined by Pope Benedict (which would mean that the Truly Reformed UN would respect subsidiarity), it would indeed be a good thing. <<<
Personally, I don’t see what is being called for as “needful” by CiV as being anything more than a gussied-up version of a world empire. Let’s look at the final two sentences of Section 67:
“The integral development of peoples and international cooperation require the establishment of a greater degree of international ordering, marked by subsidiarity, for the management of globalization. They also require the construction of a social order that at last conforms to the moral order, to the interconnection between moral and social spheres, and to the link between politics and the economic and civil spheres, as envisaged by the Charter of the United Nations.”
Aside from noting the presence of the “subsidiarity” pixie-dust (is the word UN-ese for “speedbump”?), why bother to comment further? I find the last sentence to be especially troubling. Might have saved some ink by just writing “It’s high time we immanentize the eschaton.” This isn’t what I would call a good thing, although I admit my view is open to argument.
>>> That’s a big IF.
But you ignored the IF. I didn’t.
So your critique of me is totally off target. <<<
Sorry, I didn’t see any “IF” when Pope BXVI wrote that the reformed UN _et al_ were NEEDED. He didn’t write IF they were needed. Once again, IF what you say about the irredeemable nature of the UN IS true, it can only be true if we assume that the Pope is a peddler of false hopes — which is a pretty nasty slander, and one which I do not believe.
IF the defenders of CiV respond by being captious, then perhaps Pope BXVI needs better defenders.
Lighten up. Saying a reformed UN is needed includes an IF. It is not an endorsement of the present.
The pope’s the expert on hope because his second encyclical was Spes salvi, saved by hope.
Hope is different from optimism. You don’t get it. You only know optimism/pessimism. You introduce “fruitless” where I simply wrote hope. In doing that you have reduced hope to optimism and concluded optimism is unwarranted. I conclude optimism is unwarranted but that’s the point at which hope takes over.
You don’t believe in hope. Only in optimism, so where there’s no grounds for optimism (and I agree there are none), you have nothing left.
I am a Christian. So I am obligated to hope even where humnanly speaking I have no, zero, nada optimism.
But since hope does not even exist in your way of thinking, you and I are on different planets.
But since you are unwilling to even stipulate for the purpose of discussion, the world of hope that the pope believes in, you really have no business criticizing his encyclical. You are reading it through mere-optimism eyes. It was written with eyes of both human optimism/pessimism and eyes of divine hope.
So stow your bashing of the defenders of CiV. If you are not willing to engage the pope’s thought in its own context, you should go and engage things with which you do have enough common presuppositions to permit discussion.
You know the future and that the future is hopeless.
That’s more than the pope knows.