The Pope recently received Julian Robert Hunte, president of the U.N. General Assembly, and said the following in a brief address in English: “As you know, the Holy See considers the United Nations organization a significant means for promoting the universal common good. You have undertaken a restructuring aimed at making the organization function more efficiently.”  He also stated, “This will not only ensure an effective superior instance for the just resolution of international problems, but also enable the United Nations to become an ever more highly respected moral authority for the international community.”

In his message for the 2004 World Day of Peace, he also said that the “United Nations Organization needs to rise more and more above the cold status of an administrative institution and to become a moral center where all the nations of the world feel at home and develop a shared awareness of being, as it were, a family of nations.”

During his meeting with Hunte, he said the reform is “a necessary prerequisite for the growth of an international order at the service of the whole human family.”

Could the Vatican be planning some sort of strategic alliance with a reformed and renewed United Nations? Or is it laying the groundwork to replace the United Nations as a “moral center” for the world?