VATICAN CITY, Nov. 29, 2000 (Catholic World News) - Msgr. Michel Schooyans, a noted Belgian political theorist, has expressed serious misgivings about the process of "globalization" as it is seen by the United Nations leadership.
Msgr. Schooyans, a member of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences and consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family, offered his thoughts to this week's Vatican conference on globalization and the family. He suggested that in the eyes of UN officials, globalization means "a concentration of power that has the odor of totalitarianism." The UN, the Belgian professor observed, "thinks that the world in its entirety has more value than the person." He added that according to this view — which he said is heavily influenced by New Age thinking — Christian humanism "has to be abandoned and rejected, in order to exalt a neo-pagan cult of Mother Earth."
Msgr. Schooyans, who teaches at the Catholic University of Louvain, said that the "Earth Charter" currently being prepared by UN officials offers clear evidence to support his charges. In that document, he reported, the human race is depicted as "a part of a vast universe in the process of evolution," and even marked today by "an unprecedented growth in population that overtaxes economic and social systems." The underlying philosophy of the Charter, he said, sees all religions — but particularly the Catholic faith — as obstacles to progress. The UN, Msgr. Schooyans concluded, is now aiming to create a new world order over which a "super-government" would preside. This powerful new government would suppress intermediate structures, and seek "more and more centralized control of information, knowledge, technology, human life, health, commerce, politics, and law.
"The Church will have no choice but to fight against such a form of globalization," Msgr. Schooyans remarks.
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