Remarks of His Excellency Archbishop Celestino Migliore

Apostolic Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations

on the 40^th Anniversary of Gaudium et Spes

Side-Event

United Nations Headquarters

New York City, 3 March 2005

Mr Moderator, Your Grace, Your Excellencies, dear friends and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

Firstly, let me thank you all for taking the time at this inconvenient hour to come to this side event sponsored by the Holy See, on the Integral Path of Sustainable Development.  You are all very welcome indeed.  I’d also like to thank our co-sponsors for the event, Pax Romana/ICMICA-IMCS, AVSI, and New Humanity.

Many of us were around forty years ago, but perhaps we weren’t old enough or interested enough to notice that there was something of an “earthquake” taking place in the Catholic Church – what I mean is an event in the Church that was noticed by people with no interest in Catholicism or even Christianity as such.  This “earthquake” was a council of all the world’s bishops – something that has only officially happened 21 times in our 2,000 year-long history.  There have only been three of these councils held in the last 500 years, so you can see that the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 was already something important for Catholcs.  But Vatican Two went even further than some expected.  It opened up the Catholic Church to the modern world in very many ways, and one of those ways was in its vision for the future in political, economic and social development.  We can find this theme concentrated in one of the most unusual, radical and prophetic documents that the Church has ever produced: and that document is the one now known as Gaudium et Spes.

In 1965 the world’s Bishops signed the document, and it continues to mark deeply the Catholic approach to development in all its forms.  If we want to understand where the Church stands on sustainable development, we need look no further than Gaudium et Spes.

For this reason, it’s a particular pleasure for me to welcome our main speaker at this event, [the Most Reverend] Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, who is going to help us explore this theme.  He has a long experience in the field.  He worked for 27 years in the Roman curia: he started as an official of the Pontifical Council for the Family, later becoming Undersecretary then Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.  Importantly, he helped represent the Holy See at both Cairo and Beijing.  And, until very recently, he was a Papal Nuncio and the Holy See’s Observer at UN Office Geneva.

Archbishop Martin has been directly involved in the application of the Church’s vision for development born forty years ago in Gaudium et Spes. And so, without further ado, let me give you the floor, Diarmuid/Your Grace, on the theme “the Integral Path of Sustainable Development”.

Thank you, Mr Moderator.