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Universal brotherhood, he argued, is necessary to remove from man the spec ter of war: "Never one against the other, never again, never more" he cried. "If you wish to be brothers," he added, "lay down weapons. One cannot love with offensive weapons in hand. Those weapons, especially those terrible weapons that modern science has given you, long before they produce victims and ruins, cause bad dreams, foster bad feelings, create nightmares and distrust."
The task of the U.N., the Pope continued, is not merely to prevent conflict but to organize cooperation among nations for the common good of mankind. In dealing with the problem of overpopulation and world hunger, he said, "Your task is to ensure that there is enough bread on the tables of mankind, and not to encourage an artificial birth control, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life." Finally, he proposed that any permanent edifice of peace must be based upon the "moral conscience of man"—implying a faith in God, "the father of all men."
"A Great Message." Paul's 30-minute address was dutifully greeted by a long round of applause and enthusiastic comment. "A great message," said Guatemala's Foreign Minister Alberto Herrarte. "A very great event in the history of the United Nations," seconded Foreign Minister Spyros Kyprianou of Cyprus. Commenting on television, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen paraphrased Goethe: "If you ever treat men the way they are, you never improve them; if you talk to them the way you want them to be, they become better."
Beneath the surface of praise, however, was an undercurrent of disappointment that the Pope had not said more, or said it better. In substance, he had made no departure or advance from the pronouncements of his predecessors. His poignant plea for an end to war predictably could be—and was—applauded by Moscow, Washington, London and Paris (Peking was silent). There were nuances in the speech that could give U.S. policymakers pause. One was Paul's implied suggestion that Red China should be welcomed to the U.N.—a notion that easily lent encouragement to those nations who oppose U.S. policy on that score. The Pope's peace-at-almost-any-price tone could be used as an argument against the U.S.'s firm anti-Communist policy.
Many people were disturbed by the Pope's apparently gratuitous reference to birth control; the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, Stated Clerk of the United Presbyterian Church, thought it a disappointingly "sectarian" note, and many others read Paul's statement as a sign that the Catholic Church may yet refuse to modernize its views on the subject.
Mantle, Maris, Montini. From a sectarian note, Paul turned at length to an ecumenical touch. After a reception at the U.N.—where he exchanged a long and earnest handshake with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko—the Pope left for a meeting with Orthodox, Protestant and Jewish leaders at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Family. There was no hint of