Oct 2, 2007 / 07:01 am
On Monday at the United Nations in New York, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, the Vatican’s secretary for Relations with States, took the floor to call the UN to a renovation of its founding principles. Above all, the archbishop emphasized that failures in human society can be attributed to "forgetting, or partially and selectively accepting," the principle of respect for human dignity.
At the beginning of his English-language talk, Archbishop Mamberti pointed out that "forgetting, or partially and selectively accepting," the principle of respect for human dignity "is what lies at the origin of conflicts, of environmental degradation and of social and economic injustices."
Recalling that the year 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Archbishop Mamberti said “[t]hese rights are not based on the mere will of human beings, nor in the reality of the State, nor in public powers, but rather are grounded in the objective requirements of the nature bestowed on man.”
"The most important part of our work in this context is to ensure that the inherent right to life is respected everywhere. This fundamental right must be protected from conception until natural death.”