VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — The Pontifical Academy for Life’s controversial member Mariana Mazzucato told LifeSiteNews that she found it “very sad that we go backwards instead of forwards” when asked about her membership of the academy in conjunction with her atheistic beliefs and pro-abortion views.
Speaking at a press conference on the sidelines of the Pontifical Academy for Life’s (PAV) current assembly, economist and World Economic Forum contributor Mariana Mazzucato responded to LifeSite’s question regarding her hotly debated presence as a member of the PAV.
JUST IN: At #Vatican presser today I asked @wef contributor & Pontifical Academy for Life member Mariana Mazzucato about her Academy membership, given her self-professed atheism & pro-abortion views.
“I find it very sad that we go backwards instead of forwards” she began. pic.twitter.com/9RavXt3yhQ— Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 (@MLJHaynes) February 12, 2024
Nominated by Pope Francis as an “ordinary academic” of the PAV in October 2022, Mazzucato’s presence sparked outrage amongst Catholics, who strongly criticized the move as yet more evidence of the PAV’s having “abandoned its purpose.”
READ: The Pontifical Academy for Life has abandoned its purpose under Pope Francis
“I find it very sad that we go backwards instead of forwards. I’m an academic, economist, never written an op-ed, blog, journal article or a book that has had even the word abortion or religion in it,” Mazzucato said in response to this reporter’s question about how she sees her role in the PAV, given her self-professed atheism and support for abortion.
She continued, taking issue with LifeSite for highlighting her public actions on the topics mentioned:
I once retweeted a comic who I thought did a very good job in just raising hypocrisy around some of these issues, and the fact that a retweet in an academic conference like this is highlighted by a journalist who should be interacting with what we’ve just said and what our expertise is and what we will be talking about in this conference – I’ll just say I find that sad.
Mazzucato is a member of the U.N. Committee for Development Policy, the chair of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, professor of economics at University College London, and a former member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Economics of Innovation.
The regular contributor to the WEF is also a self-described “atheist” and is enthusiastically pro-abortion – the latter being a fact also highlighted by other outlets, including EWTN, at the time of her nomination.
Both her atheistic and pro-abortion views sparked international controversy and outrage at the time of her appointment, prompting the pope and Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the PAV’s highly controversial president, to defend her membership. Francis went so far as to clarify he had personally placed her there, adding that “she is a great economist from the United States. I put her there to give a little more humanity to it.”
READ: ‘Scandalous betrayal’: JPII Academy calls on Abp. Paglia to be fired over assisted suicide remarks
Responding to LifeSite, Mazzucato stated about her presence in the PAV that it was because “my daily work both with my students, my research but also with policy makers, is all about redesigning the economy, so it’s good for humanity, it’s people all over the world not just in the global north.”
Mazzucato did not answer the point about her atheism, but instead quoted figures about global health and lack of infrastructure:
Globally about 4.5 billion people, more than half of the world population, lack full access to essential health services. Over 2 billion people are without access to safely managed water, and one child under five dies every 80 seconds from diseases caused by polluted water, and climate change is on course to cause 83 million excess deaths by the end of this century due to rising temps caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
She argued that such statistics should be the chief focus of journalists’ endeavors, saying “wouldn’t it be great if your paper and all the other papers and all the journalists in the world had real curiosity to talk to biologist, physicists, poets, economists with urgency and said ‘what will you do, how will you help us?’, not asking an economist what she thinks about abortion.”
Already by 2014, as LifeSiteNews reported, abortion had killed more than one billion children since 1920. Last year, abortion killed more than 44.6 million unborn babies, making it the leading cause of death worldwide for at least the fifth consecutive year and responsible for more deaths than the next seven causes of death combined.
The Catholic Church condemns abortion – the deliberate killing of the most innocent and defenseless human beings – as an “unspeakable crime.”
READ: ‘Greatest genocide in history’: Groundbreaking report finds 1 billion abortions in past 100 years
The economist, who is addressing the PAV today on the topic of “Governing the economy for the Common Good,” also stated that “I have 4 children, in 5 years, I’m not even one who you know, practices it [abortion]. But that’s none of your business, none of my business, I don’t think about that.”
“All I think about,” Mazzucato stated, “is how to make life on earth during our lives, not after we die, the best it can possibly be for the most people in the world and I am inspired by this Pope because that’s what he talks about day in and day out.”
Mazzucato is a notable promoter of WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset of global societal alteration and structural shifts in which growth, financial stability, and society itself revolves around adherence to the “climate change” goals. In October 2020, she authored one of TIME’s Great Reset articles, describing a futuristic vision of the year 2023, entirely built around the concept of a huge, financial shift in line with green policies and so-called “climate change.”
Mazzucato described a global population that realized the “need for governments to form a coordinated response to climate change and direct global fiscal stimulus in support of a green economy.”
In a separate piece, Mazzucato argued for climate-related lockdowns, under which governments “would limit private-vehicle use” and “ban consumption of red meat.” People would forcibly endure “extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling.”
READ: Globalists have engineered a financial collapse to pave the way for a new economic world order
Her membership of the PAV, while unthinkable in the academy’s original composition, comes in light of its overhauling by Pope Francis beginning in 2016.
The pope released new statutes for the PAV in November 2016, in which members were no longer required to sign a declaration that they uphold the Church’s pro-life teachings, while also expanding the PAV’s mandate to include a focus on the environment.
READ: Pope: Pontifical Academy for Life members no longer required to sign pro-life declaration
As a result, the PAV has been described as being permeated by “heretical gnosticism,” and Paglia’s leadership has drawn the academy into regular scandal and additional disrepute, prompting calls for his immediate resignation.