Pope Calls For 'World Authority', 'Organized International Institutions' - Empowered To Impose Sanctions

Pope Francis Calls for Giving United Nations Organization ‘Real Teeth’

THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.

Pope Francis makes his best case for multilateralism in a new teaching letter, calling for more authority for supranational organizations like the United Nations.

“The twenty-first century is witnessing a weakening of the power of nation states, chiefly because the economic and financial sectors, being transnational, tend to prevail over the political,” the pope writes in the encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All), released on Sunday.

“Given this situation, it is essential to devise stronger and more efficiently organized international institutions, with functionaries who are appointed fairly by agreement among national governments, and empowered to impose sanctions,” the pope advises in the 43,000-word text.

“When we talk about the possibility of some form of world authority regulated by law, we need not necessarily think of a personal authority,” the pontiff asserts. “Still, such an authority ought at least to promote more effective world organizations, equipped with the power to provide for the global common good, the elimination of hunger and poverty and the sure defence of fundamental human rights.”

Among the possible candidates for such a role, the pope turns his attention to the United Nations Organization, with which he enjoys close ties.

“In this regard, I would also note the need for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth,” Francis declares, citing a text from his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.

“Needless to say, this calls for clear legal limits to avoid power being co-opted only by a few countries and to prevent cultural impositions or a restriction of the basic freedoms of weaker nations on the basis of ideological differences,” he writes.

The work of the United Nations, the pope insists, “can be seen as the development and promotion of the rule of law, based on the realization that justice is an essential condition for achieving the ideal of universal fraternity.”

“There is need to prevent this Organization from being delegitimized, since its problems and shortcomings are capable of being jointly addressed and resolved,” he adds.

“The seventy-five years since the establishment of the United Nations and the experience of the first twenty years of this millennium have shown that the full application of international norms proves truly effective, and that failure to comply with them is detrimental,” Francis states.

The Charter of the United Nations is “an obligatory reference point of justice and a channel of peace,” he declares, and thus “there can be no room for disguising false intentions or placing the partisan interests of one country or group above the global common good.”

Among the normative instruments for the peaceful resolution of controversies, “preference should be given to multilateral agreements between states, because, more than bilateral agreements, they guarantee the promotion of a truly universal common good and the protection of weaker states,” he declares.

Pope Francis goes full communist

Andrea Widburg

In an encyclical published on Sunday, Pope Francis announced that he’d had an epiphany thanks to the Wuhan virus: It’s time to ditch capitalism. But that’s not all. He believes, too, that in a time of a serious infectious disease, we should focus even harder on open borders.  And he blithely upended almost two millennia of Church doctrine by doing away with St. Augustine’s “just war” theory.

These actions reflect Francis’s Catholic upbringing within the communist “liberation theology” of the Latin American church. They may also show the effects of his ongoing alliance with Chinese communists and with Muslims.

Fox Business sums up the gist of Francis’s communist dreams (emphasis mine)

“Aside from the differing ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident,” Francis wrote. “Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.”

He cited the grave loss of millions of jobs as a result of the virus as evidence of the need for politicians to listen to popular movements, unions and marginalized groups and to craft more just social and economic policies.

“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” he wrote. “It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at ‘promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity’ and makes it possible for jobs to be created, and not cut.”’

[snip]

As an outgrowth of that, Francis rejected the concept of an absolute right to property for individuals, stressing instead the “social purpose” and common good that must come from sharing the Earth’s resources. He repeated his criticism of the “perverse” global economic system, which he said consistently keeps the poor on the margins while enriching the few — an argument he made most fully in his 2015 landmark environmental encyclical “Laudato Sii” (Praised Be).

Lastly, the Pope seeks something he calls a greater “human fraternity.” In doing so, he relies upon a document he composed with the grand imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar.

The Pope is perhaps too naïve to recognize that, in Islam, the house of fraternity and peace (Dar al-Islam) is a world in which everyone is Islamic. Outside of the Islamic world is the world of war (Dar al-Harb), and every faithful Muslim must wage jihad to achieve that “peaceful,” fraternal world. Or, as Tacitus wrote when quoting Calgacus, a Caledonian who fought Rome’s imperial reach, “they [the Romans] make a desert and call it peace.”

Pope Francis, bathed in a historical ignorance, also concluded that there can be no “just wars”:

“It is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war,’” Francis wrote in the most controversial new element of the encyclical.

Both the Chinese and the Islamists must be delighted to read those words. Hitler would have liked them too. Had Frances been in the Papacy during WWII, all of Europe would have been enslaved to Germany, and all Jews, not just six million, would have been slaughtered. Homosexuals, gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities, and anyone else that the Germans dehumanized would have also found their way to the gas chambers.

As with everything he’s done since attaining the papal throne, Frances intends to undo all of the good work that the great John Paul II did in pursuit of human freedom and dignity.