At the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the head of the Vatican delegation, Archbishop Renato Martino, said: “The United Nations Organization needs to rise more and more above the cold status of an administrative institution and to become a moral center where all the nations of the world feel at home.”
To attain this objective, it is necessary to develop “a shared awareness of being, as it were, a ‘family of nations,'” the papal representative said Monday during his address to the summit.
“In an authentic family the strong do not dominate; instead, the weaker members, because of their very weakness, are all the more welcomed and served,” the archbishop stressed.
“In our interdependent and globalizing world, it is this spirit of ‘family’ that must be fostered if real progress toward the goals and ideas of sustainable development are to be realized,” Archbishop Martino concluded.
The Vatican’s permanent observer to the United Nations based his proposal on John Paul II’s 1995 U.N. address in New York.
