Vatican Under Attack at the U.N

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 21, 2000 | by Austin Ruse

Almost one year ago, a group of nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, announced that they intended to get the Vatican kicked out of the United Nations. Through extensive international media coverage, a sophisticated Website and advertising in the New York Times, the campaign has grown to 400 organizations that now are calling for the United Nations to downgrade the status of the Vatican from permanent observer to NGO.

The leader of the campaign is Frances Kissling (see Symposium, Sept. 6), president of Catholics for a Free Choice, or CFFC, an NGO dedicated to overturning official Roman Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion. Kissling last year compared the Holy See's position at the United Nations with Euro-Disney sitting on the U.N. Security Council. Kissling wondered why an entity that is in essence 100 square acres of office space and tourist attractions, with a citizenry that excludes women and children, have a place at the table where governments set policies affecting the very survival of women and children.

The campaign, called "See Change," began with 70 organizations, including one of the most powerful U.N. NGOs, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the largest abortion provider in the world. The coalition has grown to include three major strands: proabortion groups, those in favor of population control and groups hostile to religion.

Participating groups include the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, Equality Now, Marie Stopes International, the National Abortion Federation, the Feminist Majority, the Sierra Club, Population Concern, the Center for Research on Population and Security, the American Humanist Association and Atheists United. The list includes groups from more than a dozen countries.

Kissling claims her coalition will ask U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to review the status of the Holy See. Their complaint is that the Holy See delegation is able to block various initiatives to expand women's rights as asserted in U.N. documents. Over the years, beginning at the International Conference on Population and Development, the Holy See has become the main voice in opposition to expansion of abortion in U.N. documents. The Holy See participates in a loose-knit coalition of Catholic and Muslim states that also has stopped the efforts to expand gender to include homosexuality and to redefine the family to include homosexual couples.

Not even Kissling believes her campaign will have the stated effect of taking the Holy See out of the United Nations. She said as much in an article in the Washington-based Legal Times published last summer. Veteran U.N. observers understand that the Kissling effort really is intended to intimidate the Holy See delegation and to scare away its allies from Latin America and the Middle East.

A U.N. conference can be a very intimidating affair, especially when adelegation challenges the reigning antifamily ethos. The United Nations works not by voting but by consensus. This means that every delegation must agree to every word, and that means that a small coalition of states can stop almost anything from coming into a U.N. document. All they need do is dig in their heels and speak out.

Since the Cairo Conference in 1994 just such a coalition has jelled around the life and family issues. This admittedly weak, ad hoc alliance, which

includes the Holy See and some Catholic and Muslim states, has stopped abortion as an international human right. It also has stopped the redefinition of the family to include homosexual couples and the attempt to redefine gender to include homosexuals and what are called the "transgendered." Kissling wants the Holy See to stay in its foxhole. If she succeeds, the world will be an even more dangerous place, especially for families and for the unborn.

Austin Ruse is president of C-FAM, the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, the only pro-life office working full-time at U.N. headquarters.