The strong Church support for the United Nations and the international human rights movement has always seemed odd to me. The UN and human rights movement want to do more than promote within limits a few universally-recognized goods like peace and prosperity. What they want is to establish an effective system of universal governance that makes those goods—interpreted in a completely utilitarian and this-worldly way—the sole standards for social organization everywhere. As such, they necessarily conflict with Catholicism, which also makes universal claims and has a much higher and more comprehensive understanding of man’s good.
The recent meeting of the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of a Discrimination Against Women to discuss the periodic report submitted by Costa Rica highlights the problem. The report complained about Church opposition to a youth sexuality program that “start[ed] from the premise that boys and girls are entitled to sexuality.” The Committee asked the Costa Rican Minister on the Condition of Women, who was present, what “legislative and government measures have been considered to eliminate the influence of the Church on the State.” The response was that the government has slashed its financial support for the Church (which is the established religion in Costa Rica) and that the move “could be the beginning of a process of separation between the State and the Catholic Church.”
So far as I can tell, the only thing unusual about the event was the explicitness of the support given by Costa Rican officials to outside efforts to destroy fundamental institutions of their own country in the interests of compliance with what is evidently intended to be, among other things, a new world moral order based on a sort of managerial hedonism. Usually local country officials are more circumspect, even if their sympathies lie with their class allies in the UN.
To return to the interests of the Church in all this: ever since Vatican II the Church has made a great effort to put itself on the side of the forces that secular thought considers progressive. That may seem highly astute, and it may be intended to show trust in Providence. Is it really a good idea, though?