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Pope Benedict will visit the United Nations next April and the Italian press is apparently bracing for some sort of showdown. Not so, says John L. Allen Jr. in an Op-ed in today's New York Times.

Benedict had no intention of making an anti-United Nations jeremiad. Like every pope since the birth of the United Nations in 1945, Benedict supports robust global governance, in a fashion that has long bewildered neoconservative critics of the United Nations in the United States and elsewhere. If there was anything remarkable in what he said, it's only that the Vatican's public-relations crew still hasn't found a way to keep the pope from making cosmetic missteps that distract attention from his message.

While the Vatican may have its differences with United Nations agencies over sex, it also sees the organization as the lone realistic possibility for putting a human face on international politics and economics -- what Pope John Paul II called a "globalization of solidarity."

Posted by Mark Leon Goldberg at 8:26 AM