Peace at the Hilton

The new Hilton hotel in New York looks vaguely like the UN building, and recently it sounded like it as well. After sitting through a three-day agape on Pope John XXIII’s last encyclical Pacem in Terris, I am convinced that, whatever we pay our delegates to the UN, it is too little.

As a matter of rite, the Convocation on Pacem in Terris formally opened in the UN building itself, and from that mesocephalic shrine the fire was carried in hundreds of taxicabs—like many Olympic torches being run to the new hearth—toward Mr. Hilton’s 2,000-celled honeycomb at Rockefeller Center. But before the sparks scattered, in the vatic precinct itself, Hubert Humphrey spoke from the tripod: “We meet in the hall of an institution which is in the throes of growing pains . . .” (one must speak no ill-omened words about reality at the beginning of a ceremony such as this; as a matter of fact, the UN was suffering the worst defeat so far on the payments issue—a defeat that was frankly labeled as such by later speakers in the Convocation).

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Garry Wills

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The new Hilton hotel in New York looks vaguely like the UN building, and recently it sounded like it as well. After sitting through a three-day agape on Pope John XXIII’s last encyclical Pacem in Terris, I am convinced that, whatever we pay our delegates to the UN, it is too little.

As a matter of rite, the Convocation on Pacem in Terris formally opened in the UN building itself, and from that mesocephalic shrine the fire was carried in hundreds of taxicabs—like many Olympic torches being run to the new hearth—toward Mr. Hilton’s 2,000-celled honeycomb at Rockefeller Center. But before the sparks scattered, in the vatic precinct itself, Hubert Humphrey spoke from the tripod: “We meet in the hall of an institution which is in the throes of growing pains . . .” (one must speak no ill-omened words about reality at the beginning of a ceremony such as this; as a matter of fact, the UN was suffering the worst defeat so far on the payments issue—a defeat that was frankly labeled as such by later speakers in the Convocation).