Against Catholic Globalism

World rulership is the problem, not the world itself

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) of 1948 is almost unanimously considered a milestone in human history. Being forged in the aftermath of World War II, it purports to set out ‘for the first time’ those ‘fundamental human rights’ which had been so appallingly violated in the years that preceded it. From a Catholic perspective, the document is particularly interesting on another two counts. Firstly, it was deliberately written in such a way as not to require any specific religious commitment on the part of those who subscribed to it. Secondly, it was the first relatively successful attempt at achieving a genuinely global ethical standard or benchmark which, it was hoped, would gain provenance over all quarters of the earth.

In 1962, Pope St John XXIII wrote favourably about the United Nations in the encyclical Pacem in terris, as showing how people were ‘becoming more and more conscious of being living members of the universal family of mankind’. He says of the UNDHR itself that it was ‘a step in the right direction, an approach toward the establishment of a juridical and political ordering of the world community’ (§144).

Such was the 1960s zeitgeist, a time when it was said human beings were developing a so-called ‘global consciousness’. Some said this reached a crescendo with man landing on the moon in 1969, when some of the earliest photographs of the entire globe were beamed across the world and seen by millions of people. The very first images of the globe had actually been taken by the ATS-3 satellite in 1967, and then were said by the founder of the ecological magazine Whole Earth Catalogue Stewart Brand, to have so altered the human mind that ‘no-one would ever perceive things the same way’. It is rarely mentioned that Brand admitted he actually had this thought a year earlier in 1966, while on an acid trip.