Get Vatican out of UN, says UK secular group

By Andrew John.
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Britain’s main secular organization wants the Vatican out of the United Nations, where it has no business being, and uses its status to force through “backward doctrines,” the group claims.
When the National Secular Society (NSS) pointed repeatedly to the cost of the recent visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the UK, the government said the Vatican was a valuable partner in the fight against global poverty through achieving the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs).
“This week at a United Nations summit on the MDGs, the ‘Holy See’ objected to the introduction into the policy document of the issues of family planning and gay rights,” says the NSS on its website and in its weekly Newsline e-zine.
It continues by saying that the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States, Dominique Mamberti, has told the General Assembly that, if the issues of contraception and gay equality were included, the MDGs ‘will have become a veritable fraud for the integral human development of peoples.’”
The president of the NSS, Terry Sanderson, said: “This is further proof that the so-called Holy See has no business being part of the United Nations. It uses this unique status to try to force its own backward doctrines on to the developing world. When is someone going to call it to account?”
Controversy
The Pope’s September visit to Britain had already become riddled with controversy several months before it happened, and led to demonstrations, because of his apparent cover-up of priestly child molestation when he was a cardinal and because of the huge cost to the UK taxpayer. If the visit were a pastoral one rather than a state one, this cost would be met by the Catholic Church, but it could cost Britain up to £20 million, plus the expense of security, which will come from existing police funds.
A recent suggestion by the Pope’s second-in-command, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, that child abuse and paedophilia were connected with homosexuality brought condemnation even from fellow Catholics in the UK.
Recently, the atheist authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens put their weight behind a plan to have the Pope arrested when he gets to Britain and charged under international law with crimes against humanity. However, the UK government acted quickly to stop such a move.
There were several demonstrations during the Pope’s visit, during which he also beatified a 19th-century cardinal – John Henry Newman – widely thought to have been gay.


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