by Allan Carlson, Ph.D.

Two factors shaped the attitudes toward the family to be found in the early years of the United Nations. To begin with, the horrors created by the nazi occupation of Europe--the death camps, the eugenics campaigns, the experimentation on human subjects--were vivid images in the minds of those who gathered in San Francisco in 1945 to inaugurate the new organization. Some delegates understood that it was particularly important to rescue "the family" as an ideal and an institution from the race-motivated distortions introduced by Adolf Hitler.

Second, four rival worldviews emerged out of the rubble of the World War, seeking to shape the post-war environment. Dominant at the political and military level was the rivalry between the Communist Model found in the Soviet Union and the Liberal Democratic model of the Americans: the period, 1945 to 1990, is commonly seen through the lens of the resulting Cold War. But at the social policy, and specifically at the family policy, level, a different competition of worldviews ensued: between Christian Democracy and Social Democracy. In the early years of the United Nations, particularly from 1946 to 1949, Christian Democracy held sway. There were notable results, including the crafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: an almost pure expression of the Christian Democratic worldview. But starting in 1949, Social Democracy began to displace its rival: a process largely complete by the late-1960's.

Let us consider these rivals. The Christian Democracy movement which took form in Europe in the mid-1940's claimed to be something altogether new. Some Christian political movements before Hitler's triumphs, such as Action Francaise in France, had tended toward "clerical fascism." Others had leaned toward an "ultramontane" rejection of modernity. Still others, such as the Center Party of Germany, had held to a strictly "Catholic" politics of interest. While the spirit of Pope Leo XIII's remarkable, forward-looking, 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, occasionally seeped in--particularly through the Christian labor movement--the common worldview of Christian political movements before 1940 was suspicion of modernity, distrust of democracy, opposition to individualism, and rejection of the legacy of the French Revolution.

Yet in the 1930's, something fresh and creative was also being born, with particular clarity in France. The key philosophical figure was Emmanuel Mounier. Writing in the Catholic idea-journal, Espirit, Mounier worked out a "Christianized" version of individualism, which he called "personalism." This view saw every human person as unique and special. Each human was a "free agent" with "inherent" moral qualities, and with rights rooted in a natural law. This vision placed strong emphasis on the importance of developing all dimensions of the human personality: "social as well as individual and spiritual as well as material." Mounier emphasized that the full flowering of the individual would come only through social structures such as family, local community, and labor union. He called for creation of a revolutionary Christian party, one "hard," one worthy of Christ, and one "radical" in its social-economic vision.

In 1943, a young Catholic philosophy student and disciple of Mounier, Gilbert Dru, drew up a Manifesto for postwar Christian Democratic work. He emphasized the revolutionary quality of true Christian action: the whole person must become engaged, not just as a cog in a party machine, but as a militant working to build a new France on radical Christian principles. A year later, Dru paid for this act with his life, being shot by the Gestapo as the Germans evacuated Lyons.

The further elaboration of Christian Democratic doctrine in France came primarily from two journalist-philosophers, Etienne Gilson and Etienne Borne, both writing for the journal, Aube. Other writers appeared in post-Fascist Italy and in the Low Countries. They all rejected the atomistic individualism that had characterized the so-called "bourgeois" 19^th Century. This liberalism of the middle class, they said, had exhibited a "narrow individualistic outlook" and had shown "an indifference toward basic institutions such as the family." As the Italian writer, Giovanni Gronchi, chimed in: "The bourgeoisie has given us mechanical progress and not civilization, because civilization has above all a spiritual connection." These writers also scorned the Socialists and Communists for their "materialism" and hostility toward revealed religion. Indeed, bourgeois liberalism and communism could be seen as "two facets of a single error." The task now facing Western Civilization was to reconcile individualism and the reality of industrial society with Christian teaching; to find a middle way between bourgeois liberalism and collectivism.

For those of us from the Anglophone world, this language may sound familiar, for it is very close to the quest for a third way led by the English Christian writers Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. They called their project, the Distributist state; Christian Democracy might be seen as its continental counterpart.

A second plank in the Christian Democratic platform was that while the movement and party would be openly Christian, it would be neither clerical nor strictly Catholic. As the Italian Alcide de Gasperi explained, the Party member received "from the Christian patrimony…the vital inspiration which will guide him in his public activities." But unlike the "confessional" political parties of late 19^th and early 20^th century Europe, Christian Democracy would not pursue a narrowly Catholic institutional agenda. Following the anti-religious darkness of the nazi conquest of Europe, this movement would instead unite Catholic and Protestant believers and sympathetic Jews in a defense of Christendom as a civilization with religiously infused values. In 1946, the French movement endorsed the concept of "a lay state"; so did the Italian movement, while still calling for a Constitution that recognized God as the "fountainhead of life" and where the fundamental institutions of the state conformed to Christian ethics. As Konrad Adenauer, a Christian Democratic leader in Germany, explained: theirs was a "party of the Christian Worldview," a new beginning and one genuinely interdenominational.

Christian Democracy also sought to deliver both freedom and justice, goals to be pursued with equal vigor. As Etienne Borne explained in his book, Cet Inconnu:

• Freedom without justice is artificial, deceptive and hypocritical; it can be used to justify the mechanism of the free market and the servitude of the proletariat; such freedom is, in fact, the antithesis of freedom. Likewise, justice without freedom leads to tyranny and to the totalitarianism of Soviet communism or Fascist corporatism.

To accomplish these tasks, to reconcile individualism with community and to deliver both justice and liberty, the Christian Democrats gave priority to the defense of what they called natural social structures. These included neighborhoods, towns, labor unions, and churches; but the one given most attention was the family. Etienne Gilson, in his 1948 book Notre Democratie, neatly summarized the point (slide 1):

These institutions were intrinsic or innate, meaning that they would always reappear out of the very instincts and nature of man. They also pre-existed the state; that is, the law did not create families and towns; it "found them." The goal of Christian Democracy society, Gilson stressed, "was the perfection of the human person." But this could occur "only in and by society." And in turn, this required a tolerant pluralism. As Etienne Borne put it: "A people is not really a people and certainly does not live in freedom unless the natural social groups which compose it accept each other, and unless the state recognizes their differences and ensures that their interests are represented."

The great disorders of the early 20^th Century could be explained, in part, by the weakening of the family, as an industrialism backed by materialistic philosophers stripped away family function after function. Policy should now seek to return functions to the family. But this would not mean a return to the patriarchal, paternalistic family system of old Europe. The Father-dominated family could not be reconciled with "personalism." Christian Democrats held that women should know and enjoy full civil, legal, economic, and political rights. At the same time, restoration of the family did mean that control of education should be returned to parents; that motherhood should enjoy special protection by the state; and that heads-of-households should receive a "family wage" (or "family allowances"), so that mothers might be empowered to remain home with their children. Put more broadly, government's obligation was to protect the natural family, to encourage and support it; never to displace it.

Unlike earlier Christian political movements, the post war Christian Democrats enthusiastically embraced political democracy as the superior venue for the full development of the free human personality. Indeed, they held that democracy itself derives from Christian principles, such as the equality of all believers. They even urged expansion of the democratic principle. As Gilson argued (slide 2): 

The Movement stressed that economic life should be subordinate to spiritual life and the existence of families. This made Christian Democrats the friend of widely distributed small property and an advocate for peasant or family farms. They favored strong state controls over large, impersonal corporations and the "humanization" of workplaces through measures such as the "family wage."

Under girding the Christian Democratic worldview was a new interpretation of history. Where the Christian churches had invariably been hostile to the French Revolution of 1789, and its program of "Liberty, Equality & Fraternity," the new Movement aimed at embracing the Revolution and these words, albeit with a twist (slide 3):

This reconnection to the Revolution of 1789 also made Human Rights a central Christian Democratic concern, but again with a special twist. Where secular views of the French experience relied on a "naturalistic" understandings of rights, the new movement emphasized the rooting of human rights in the Creation itself, in the Natural Law. Such rights were "inviolable" and "innate" because their fountainhead was God Himself. Bearing a healthy suspicion of the state, Christian Democrats embraced Human Rights in order to protect "the natural rights of each individual" and of "natural social groups" from the overweening power of government. Also advancing social and economic democracy, the movement held to a positive view of social rights as necessary to the security and dignity of humanity. As one historian would summarize this worldview:

• …belief in God, awareness of the dignity of human beings who had been endowed by their Creator with inviolable rights and duties, belief in the sanctity of the life of every person, in every phase of their existence, belief in marriage and the family as fundamental for social interaction between people and as a safeguard for future generations, [and belief] in the structures of solidarity and subsidarity…."

The Christian Democrats of Europe would carry these novel, exciting, even revolutionary ideas into the early assemblies of the new United Nations, with important result. In France, Christian Democracy took political form as the Mouvement Republicain Populaire, or MRP. It became part of the French governing coalition in 1946, led by figures such as Robert Shuman (who became Foreign Minister for a critical three years), Maurice Schumann, and Georges Bidault. Strong Christian Democratic parties also formed in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and West Germany.

This worldview had especial influence in the Economic and Social Council, which oversaw all U.N. work on issues of social policy and human rights, including the Commission on Human Rights, established in 1946. Named to head the Department of Social Affairs was Professor Henri Laugier of France, a figure sympathetic to the Christian Democratic cause. More important, though, was Charles Habib Malik of Lebanon, who became President of ECOSOC in the critical year, 1948, and who actively served on The Commission on Human Rights.

Malik was an Arab Christian with a French education and a philosopher wholly in tune with the new Christian Democratic currents. A rich Christian imagery ran through his speeches and writings, above all in his view that "there is a direct relationship between peacemaking and having the right relationship to God--the ground of being and existence." Echoing the words of the French Christian Democratic martyr Gilbert Dru, Malik called for a fundamental Western Revolution, with "The Living God" at its core. Turning upside down the ideas of the German nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he added: "Nietzscheans humbly grounding themselves in God is what this moment of history really needs." According to insiders, Malik would be a key actor in crafting the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Another central player was Rene Cassin, a lawyer skilled in international law, also from France. As a member of the staff of The Commission on Human Rights, Cassin took the lead role in producing successive drafts of the Universal Declaration. While himself Jewish, Cassin was sympathetic to the French MRP, and to the goals of Christian Democracy. In his own speeches and essays, he emphasized the derivation of the human rights idea from Holy Scripture. The Jews, inspired by their idea of "one God, father of all men," held "rather early a vivid repugnance to serfdom." Jesus and Paul taught that "there is no more distinction between Jew and Gentile, between free men and slaves. All form one large family, one human family." Cassin emphasized that the 18^th Century Human Rights Declarations (such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man) exalted individualism, which had opened the way to abuses of liberty. Drawing directly from Christian Democratic doctrine, Cassin argued that rights and liberties of individuals must be understood "as embedded within social groups and bonds" such as "family, household, vocation, city, and nation."

The French delegation to the Commission on Human Rights was active on the Drafting Committee for the Universal Declaration, and included several Christian Democrats, as did the delegations from Chile and Belgium. Prof. Giraud of France joined Cassin on the staff. Meanwhile, Robert Schuman, as French Foreign Minister, insured a strong Christian Democratic influence on the process from the domain of the Security Council.

It is true that Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the American wartime President, was chairman of the Human Rights Commission, and that American traditionalists have learned to be suspicious of the whole Roosevelt legacy. But at least relative to family issues, this is not a fair stance. Eleanor Roosevelt was not a liberal or equity feminist of the sort we know so well today. She was a "social feminist," in the mold of Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor in the 1930's. While embracing the full legal and political equality of men and women, social feminists focused on measures to give special protection to women as mothers and to deliver a family wage to fathers with wives and children at home. These were views almost identical to those of the Christian Democrats from Europe.

Approved by the U.N. General Assembly on December 10, 1948, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was, in one historian's judgment, "largely identical" with the value system expressed in the Christian Democratic worldview. From its use of "laicized" language of Divine origin (such as the "inherent dignity" and "inalienable rights" of man) to the use of the term "natural" to define the family to the guarantee of a "right to life" to the affirmation of a family wage, the Universal Declaration might be seen as a great triumph of the new Christian Democratic worldview.

More specifically, we find in Article 16c the affirmation of "natural" social institutions (slide 4):

Even the use of the word "society" as distinct from and prior to "the state" is a Christian Democratic marker.

In Article 25, one finds support for family social rights, with particular emphasis on a "family wage" (slide 5):

The Universal Declaration affirms the priority and autonomy of the family, as in Article 26(3) (slide 6):

Even the very structure of the Declaration embodies the Christian Democratic understanding of human rights. Articles 1-21 protect the political rights of persons against the ambitions of the state; in this, the document resembles the Bill of Rights found in the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, Articles 22-27 protect the "social and economic rights" of persons, precisely as Gilbert Dru or Etienne Gilson would have insisted.

Even the term, "equality," subject before and later to so much mischief, finds rich meaning in the Universal Declaration through "personalist" conceptions of "the right to life" (Article 3), "the dignity and worth of the human person" (Preamble), and innate human nature (slide 7):

Indeed, the only Christian Democratic theme lacking is an open affirmation of the Deity of Creation. Several members of the drafting committee, led by Charles Malik, sought inclusion of this idea. But in the end, they agreed to more universal language that implied, rather than named, God.

In sum, the Christian Democratic worldview dominated discussion of "social policy" and "human rights policy" during the founding years of the United Nations, 1946 to 1948, and it remained an intellectual force there for at least another decade. While emergence of the "Cold War" put the brake on further development of "human rights" documents, the promised international covenants on "Economic, Social and Cultural Rights" and "Civil and Political Rights," finally issued in 1966, still affirmed that "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society, and is entitled to protection by society and the state."

Yet by this time, a rival worldview was gaining ascendance within the United Nations structure, a worldview also untarnished by association with nazism or fascism: Democratic Socialism. This idea-system first took root at the U.N. through Scandinavian dominance of the Secretariat between 1946 and 1962, in the persons of Trygve Lie and Dag Hammarskjold.

The Norwegian Trygve Lie was the first Secretary General of the new organization, serving from 1946 to 1953. We now know that he was the prime choice of the Soviet Union to assume this post, and that his name first surfaced on a candidate's list through Alger Hiss, a U.S. State Department official later revealed as a Soviet agent. Lie himself was apparently never a member of the Norwegian Communist Party. But he did have an early flirtation with Bolshevism, and in 1921 journeyed to Moscow, where he met with Lenin. Lie retained a strong sympathy for the Soviet experiment in Russia, and the Communists saw him as a pliable tool for their U.N. ambitions.

Lie was a leader of the Norwegian Labor party, and considered to be the "hard left." Active mainly in Norway's domestic policy during the 1930's, he had gained a reputation as a fervent social engineer.

Compromised by the politics of the Korean War, Lie resigned in early 1953. Replacing him was the Swedish civil servant, Dag Hammarskjold. It is important to distinguish the myth of Hammarskjold from the man. He was, as one biographer puts it, a person of "rare sensibility and catholic interests." A modern mystic, his Christianity was real and intense, albeit personal: not denominational, but one man's daily dialogue with God. Born to a old noble Swedish family, with a tradition of service to King and State, Hammarskjold never joined a political party. Yet in every way but officially, he was a Swedish Social Democrat. In the early 1930's, he acknowledged his conversion to "left socialist intellectuality." He gained his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Stockholm, and joined Gunnar Myrdal (his dissertation disputant) and Knut Wicksell (his mentor, and Minister of Finance in the Social Democratic government) in transforming Sweden into a socialist state. Through posts in the Finance Ministry and State Bank, Hammarskjold served as a leading architect of the emerging Swedish welfare state.

Hammarskjold enjoyed the camaraderie of working with others over long spells to solve policy problems, and he expressed disappointment whenever a colleague, newly married, no longer put in the evening hours that he did. Hammarskjold himself never married, and some of his contemporaries--including his predecessor Trygve Lie--whispered that he was a closeted homosexual. But this does not appear to be true. His biographers agree that sex played little, if any, part in his life. Rather, he was "almost asexual," a "born bachelor," "a determined loner." Relative to family issues, this did mean that Hammarskjold had little personal knowledge of the reality of marriage and childrearing, and was quite willing to leave such matters to the "experts."

Under the influence of Lie and Hammarskjold, Democratic Socialism grew as an idea force within the Secretariat. Scandinavians disproportionately peopled its offices, and adherence to the leaders' worldview became valuable to advancement.

Among those named to a key post was Alva Myrdal. Secretary-General Lie knew of her work in the 1930's on the "population crisis." With husband Gunnar Myrdal, she had crafted a positive Social Democratic response to the sharp decline in Scandinavian birth rates. In essence, the Myrdals had argued that the only way to raise fertility was by socializing the costs and burdens of childrearing. Their theories, embodied in the 1934 book, Kris i befolkningsfrågan, gave an ideological justification for constructing the modern welfare state. Published in Norwegian translation in 1935, this volume and subsequent debate stimulated the creation of the Norwegian Royal Commission on Population, and a series of Labor Party proposals to implement "the Myrdal line."

Alva Myrdal drew Lie's attention again in 1948, through an address at the U.N. offices in Geneva on "The Surplus Energy of Married Women." With her own new-model-marriage to Gunnar then in trouble, Alva Myrdal argued that child rearing and housewifery were no longer enough to keep a modern woman content. They needed to move, post haste, into the world of outside work.

In mid-December, 1948, Lie named Alva Myrdal to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary-General for the U.N.'s Social Commission. As such, she became the highest ranking woman at the UN: "third person from the top," as she would say. Her responsibilities were to manage U.N. work on women's issues, population, welfare, and human rights. Alva Myrdal saw this as the perfect opportunity to turn the U.N. Secretariat into a vehicle for the spread of her version of Social Democratic feminism. On December 14, 1948--ironically, the very same week that the U.N. General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration--Alva Myrdal wrote to her friend, Disa Västberg (slide 8):

What were those Social Democratic feminist views? As articulated by Myrdal in the 1930's and 1940's, they included:

• There are no moral absolutes. Morals, even traditional Christian morals, are merely the product of historical evolution and institutional change. If large numbers of persons no longer behaved in accord with so-called "moral standards," then those standards--rather than the people--needed to be changed.

• The existing, so-called traditional family inherited from the 19^th Century "is almost…pathological," "rootless," "isolated," and doomed. It should be replaced by a new family model, where women stood beside men "as comrades" in outside labor; where children became a social--meaning governmental--responsibility, requiring state-provided infant and day care, and subsidies for everything from clothing to daily meals to summer camps; where children, from the earliest age, are "indoctrinated" into a new model of social cooperation; where marriage is stripped of its autonomy and specific legal protections; where the family surrenders all of its remaining functions, except reproduction; where "voluntary parenthood" is assured through liberalized abortion laws and the early exposure of children to sex education; and where the parental control of children is exposed as unhealthy (slide 9):

• Gender equality demands the leveling of all institutions, traditions, and cultural structures that get in its way, including "natural" ones. Even the "great and fundamental differences" between men and women that were created by nature had to be eliminated or compensated for by state intervention.

The contest between the Christian Democratic and the Social Democratic worldviews came to a head in the 1960's. The victor would be Social Democracy. Why?

The cause, in part, was the collapse of Christian Democracy as a vital ideology. The excitement, energy, and sense of positive revolution evident in the 1940's dissipated during the next decade. In France, Christian Democracy's main political vehicle, the MRP, lost support to Charles de Gaulle's new party, the RPI (Ressemblement du Peuple Francois), and by 1958 had disappeared altogether. In Italy and Germany, meanwhile, Christian Democratic parties consolidated their hold on power, at the price of their vision. By the early 1960's, they were increasingly pragmatic, bureaucratic, and defenders of the status quo. Ambitious office seekers, rather than idealists, came to dominate the party ranks. Movements for "moral and political renewal" became simply mass parties of the right-of-center. When a new "crisis of values" hit Europe with particular force in 1968, the Christian Democrats were quite simply unprepared to respond. They appeared by then as old and discredited guardians of a self-satisfied materialism.

Indeed, it is now clear that a "silent revolution" in values set in among Europeans (and Americans) after 1963. This marked an ideational shift away from values affirmed by Christian teaching (such as "responsibility, sacrifice, altruism, and sanctity of long-term commitments") and toward a strong "secular individualism" focused on the desires of the self. Surveys of European youth in the 1970's and 1980's showed that they "appear to be extending non-conformism with respect to abortion, divorce, etc., to parenthood as well," agreeing by large majorities with statements such as "children need only one parent" and "children are no longer needed for personal fulfillment." Even those choosing to parent did so only "to satisfy their private needs," rather than to meet religious, family, or communal obligations. This new tolerance of lifestyles even came near to excluding parenting and family life as an option.

Another commentator pointed to the swift legalization of abortion and to "the falling awareness" among Europeans "of the dignity of every person, even the old and disabled." He added: "…naked individualism and unbridled libertinism have become increasingly widespread in recent years…Female emancipation, which is well advanced,…appears to be headed in this direction" as well. Meanwhile, the courts and public opinion grew tolerant of sexual deviance. Such changes symbolized the triumph of the Social Democratic worldview in the sexual and family areas over the views of Christian Democracy.

Alva Myrdal had begun her work at ECOSOC in 1949. Two and a half years later, she moved to UNESCO in Geneva, where she headed the Division of Social Science. With other Social Democrats, she planted the seeds of change, where bore fruit after 1963:

• On women's issues, as a shift from the original U.N. focus on gaining the vote for women and suppressing prostitution, to the new concentration on equal employment, the suppression of gender roles, the use of non-maternal child care, and family change;

• On population issues, as a shift from the encouragement and protection of large families to strict attention to overpopulation as a problem, to be combated through sex education and "reproductive rights";

• On family issues, as a shift from affirmation of the family as "the fundamental and natural social group unit" to a portrayal of the family as antiquated and oppressive; and

• On human rights, as a change from a "personalist" focus on the innate dignity of each human person and the necessary place of humans in natural communities to a radical feminist individualism.

And there have been real consequences. You will hear much over the next few days about the "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women" [CEDAW]. I will only note there that its content is closely aligned with these new views. Taken as a whole, CEDAW strips the family of all autonomy and authority. It gives moral legitimacy solely to the isolated, radical individual. And it grants sweeping power to the state to regulate, restructure, and even abolish the natural family. This is the meaning, for example, of Article 5 which declares (slide 10):

In related fashion, the "Convention on the Rights of the Child" contains measures that subvert the authority of parents over their children; strip away the authority of religious faith and tradition in favor of a politicized and radical social science; and prevent nations and peoples from sheltering their own unique cultures. In Article 13, to choose one example, we read (slide 11):

To put it simply, this understanding of "rights" is the polar opposite of that found in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration ("Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."); and it is symbolic of the victory of one worldview over another.

But in recent years, the conflict has returned. Since the U.N. meetings at Cairo and Beijing in the mid 1990's, an international pro-family movement has begun to coalesce, by fits and starts. The contest for intellectual control of the United Nations continues; and the status of the family is still at the core of this struggle. Since the United Nations is not a democratic institution--that is, citizens of the various nations never directly select via ballot their U.N. representatives--the task is different than the one found in the various nations. All the same, the contest must be enjoined in the one venue open to popular influence: namely, the NGO world.

A vital lesson to be drawn from the experience of the last 55 years is that "Ideas Have Consequences." When the United Nations Organization favored the family, it was the result of ideas developed among a relatively small circle of European and Mediterranean Christian Democrats. When the U.N.O. turned hostile to the natural family, it was the consequence of ideas first developed among an even smaller band of Scandinavian Social Democrats. A critical current need is to build a new pro-family/pro-life vision; a fresh worldview that could be to the early 21^st Century what Christian Democracy was to the late 1940's. To succeed this time, though, this worldwide movement must appeal to more than Western Christians: it must embrace all religiously grounded family morality systems around the globe, without descending into the banal. I believe that projects such as The World Congress of Families are taking steps toward that goal.

A second lesson from the last 55 years is that "people are policy." The influence of Trygve Lie, Dag Hammarskjold, and Alva Myrdal was instrumental in the eventual victory of the Social Democratic worldview at the U.N. From this angle, the imperatives for the future include:

• To take energetic action within the NGO process to blunt or prevent new assaults on family integrity;

• To identify, protect, and help advance existing "friends of the family" within the U.N. Secretariat;

• To "place" such friends in positions of current or potential influence within the U.N. Secretariat;

• And to build an international movement of "religiously grounded family morality systems" that can influence and eventually shape social policy at the United Nations.

Welcome to these tasks.