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July 17, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — The Vatican is adding its voice to that of globalist institutions such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum in view of “collective action” for the rebuilding of society — or rather, the building of a new society with many utopian undertones. The U.N. and the Davos WEF, together with Prince Charles of England, recently announced global reflections that will lead to a “Global Reset” conference at the beginning of next year. The Vatican COVID-19 Commission is promoting the same kind of action: global disarmament, a “green” response that will involve a profound change to the economy in the wake of Laudato si’, universal health care, and other global “solutions” in harmony with the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (the 2030 SDGs).

In an interview published on July 1 by Our Sunday Visitor, Fr. Augusto Zampini, assistant secretary of the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and coordinator of the COVID-19 task force, used precisely the same language. “We need leaders in public, private and civil sectors to press the reset button — to once and for all realize that the way we have been living our lives until now is not sustainable,” he said.

Zampini said the Vatican COVID-19 Commission, under Pope Francis’ leadership, is busy making the most of this “unprecedented opportunity to reflect on the shortcomings of our institutions and development models” to draw up proposals “to envision a better future” post-pandemic.

At a more recent press conference at the Vatican, the COVID-19 task force created at the initiative of Pope Francis and that reports directly back to him offered its suggestions for the “post-COVID” world. These include spending more on (socialized) healthcare and less on weapons and calling for a global ceasefire.

The July 7 press conference, under the title “Preparing the future, building peace in the time of COVID-19,” was led by the special task force’s president, Cardinal Peter Turkson. He is also prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

Cardinal Peter Turkson told journalists that “the reduction of conflicts is the only way to reduce injustice and inequality.” “Armed violence, conflict and poverty are in fact linked in a cycle that impedes peace, fosters human rights violations and hinders development,” he said.

However, conflicts are in no way directly linked with the spread of a pandemic. And while it is true that many suffer because of them, it is idealistic to imagine that they will disappear like snow in hot weather because some well-meaning leaders say they should. Also, conflicts are not evil per se: there are just wars and evil aggressors, if only because human nature is flawed and has been since the Fall.

In the same vein, Cardinal Turkson spoke out during the press conference against spending on weapons and the military: today, such spending is “unprecedented,” he said, insisting that it should instead be used for international aid and the funding of health care.

Sister Alessandra Smerilli, an economist by training who is the coordinator of the Vatican’s Commission for COVID-19 on the economic front, went even farther, telling the press it would be useful to convert weapon companies into health care enterprises helping to find treatment for “communicable diseases.”

“Pope Francis asked us for creative solutions. So we ask ourselves: what if instead of making the arms race, we made the race towards food, health and work safety? What are the citizens asking at this moment? Do they need a militarily strong State, or a State that invests in common goods?” she said.

Such pacifist talk looks pretty from the outside, but it is reminiscent of the disarmament movement during the Cold War. Not unsurprisingly, many so-called grassroots anti-arms movements were financed at the time by the Soviet Union. Protecting citizens from invaders and aggressors requires preparedness, for the common good of their nation.

But the whole point of the globalist argument is that the “common good” is no longer considered to be the good of the family, or the family of families that is the nation, but that of the so-called “Common Home” that includes the whole of humanity and, indeed, the whole of nature.

The Vatican is clearly supporting this approach, using the COVID-19 pandemic in view of a constructivist view of politics, in which “ecology” plays a major role. “There can be no healing without peace. Now is the time to build a world that better reflects a truly integral approach to peace, human development and ecology,” said Cardinal Turkson.

Like Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations (and former president of the Socialist International) or Prince Charles and other world leaders, the Vatican COVID-19 is making very clear its desire to capitalize on the havoc wrought by the almost universal response to the Chinese coronavirus to implement a new, revolutionary society.

Fr. Augustino Zampini, told Revista Ecclesia, the news magazine of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, that we are in “a unique moment to make a deep change, to build a healthier and more equitable world and planet with healthy people and institutions.”

The Vatican task force, he said, has the objective of working as a “catalyst to help global responses to the crisis to be interconnected, and that local responses should have a global mark.” “You don’t move out of a pandemic without strong connection, without universal solidarity.”

Fr. Zampini added that “the structural issue of inequality is both a cause and a consequence of the pandemic,” quoting the difficulties faced by the poor who live from day to day and cannot afford to stop working in countries where there are no social provisions for them.” He also recalled Pope Francis’s mention of “the possibility of implementing a universal basic wage:” “we studied this financial instrument in depth,” he said.

Historically, having recourse to a guaranteed universal income has shown to be “easily implemented,” he said, “all the while sticking to a policy of promoting dignified and sustainable employment, of course,” he added.

The genuine suffering and destitution of many because of lockdown policies implemented all over the world certainly call for the help and solidarity of those who are more fortunate (and also, but the Vatican does not say so, for the aid of the true faith and the sacraments, and perhaps an end to the sanitary dictatorship that is destroying economies), but not the institutionalization and internationalization of redistribution of wealth and public health care — or, to call it by another name, international socialism.

In fact, in the same way that masks blur faces and identities and social interaction, institutionalized “social nets” erase the personal face of charity, which is no longer seen as a freely given gift from people to people.

The Commission’s globalist approach is very clear in the work themes of the fourth of its five groups: “Supporting governance to promote global solidarity.”

On the ecological front, the message being sent out by the Vatican COVID-19 task force is that the COVID-19 pandemic “is a crisis with nature.” This is the title of one of the Commission’s weekly newsletters dating back to April 27–May 3, giving specific news from the “Ecology task force.”

The newsletter opened with these lines: “The coronavirus crisis can be seen as the result of humanity’s increasingly disharmonious relationship with the natural world. This latest coronavirus, like its predecessors, is a ‘zoonotic’ disease — an infection that has jumped from animals to people, often due to pathogens passing from wild animals to humans and then leading to human-to-human transmission.”

As with the climate-change narrative, human beings are being called responsible for all the bad things happening or said to be happening to nature. Interestingly, the COVID-19 task force newsletter spoke about “mass extinction,” “biodiversity,” and global warming: “Humanity has just a few years left to ensure that global temperatures do not cross the critical 1.5°C threshold.”

The pandemic is “a clear warning shot from nature,” it said, compounding the fear of climate change–linked announced catastrophes with the fear of death because of COVID-19 or even more lethal viruses later on.

To date, COVID-19 has caused fewer global deaths than the ordinary yearly flu and a good deal less than respiratory infections every year. But the Vatican goes along with the mainstream narrative.

Speaking with La Croix International, the English-language issue of the unofficial daily of the French bishops, Fr Zampini said:

Pope Francis stressed in Laudato si’ that the social is ecological, and vice versa. COVID-19 proves it: our health depends on the health of our ecosystems, on the solidarity with which we take care of each other and of our planet. Laudato si’ emphasizes the profoundly ecological nature of the current crisis, in that it is a crisis of relationships. To counter it, we need to radically re-imagine the relationships between ourselves and with Creation, overcoming the dichotomies between environment and prosperity, politics and economics, health of people and health of systems[.] … The encyclical is a solid foundation for building inclusive, caring and healing responses to the pandemic. It reminds us that in this time of social change, we can regenerate relationships with our neighbors and our environment. The response to the crisis is an act of ecological imagination.

He also said that “if policy-makers continue to pursue the rhetoric of ‘recovery,’ by ‘resuming’ what was unequal, unjust and unsustainable, the poor will continue to suffer the consequences.”

Zampini added that “the healing of societies and policies creates universal solidarity that can overcome national egoism, corporate egoism and even religious egoism. In this way, we can in turn heal the economy.”

What is “religious egoism”? Perhaps it has something to do with preferring one’s own faith and believing that it is true, and that therefore other faiths cannot be true at the same time. Perhaps it refers to considering eternal salvation as the true concern of the spiritual realm, which is the realm of the Church. Surely, Zampini does not himself answer that question. But what is evident is that the Vatican’s COVID-19 Commission is not particularly anxious to spread the true faith or to work on anything, “for the post-COVID world,” other than “ecology, economy, safety and health and using Laudato si’ as a guiding framework.”

Those are Zampini’s words. He added: “We do this in collaboration with other groups and institutions, addressing issues ranging from disarmament to finance, from women to technology.”

How convenient that the solutions of the COVID-19 Vatican Commission line up so neatly with those of the globalist powers that be.

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Jeanne Smits has worked as a journalist in France since 1987 after obtaining a Master of Arts in Law. She formerly directed the French daily Présent and was editor-in-chief of an all-internet French-speaking news site called reinformation.tv. She writes regularly for a number of Catholic journals (Monde & vie, L’Homme nouveau, Reconquête…) and runs a personal pro-life blog. In addition, she is often invited to radio and TV shows on alternative media. She is vice-president of the Christian and French defense association “AGRIF.” She is the French translator of The Dictator Pope by Henry Sire and Christus Vincit by Bishop Schneider, and recently contributed to the Bref examen critique de la communion dans la main about Communion in the hand. She is married and has three children, and lives near Paris.