VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis received the director general of the pro-abortion World Health Organization (WHO) in a private audience at the Vatican this morning.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the current director general of the WHO, met with Pope Francis in private audience July 24, in a meeting which was only announced afterwards in the Holy See’s daily bulletin.
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No further details were released by the Vatican, and LifeSite’s requests for comments were not returned by time of publication.
Tedros, who has led the WHO as director general since 2017, previously met Pope Francis in 2018 when they discussed “ways to ensure that all people can obtain the healthcare they need, whoever they are, wherever they live.” Tedros praised Pope Francis’ “support for our effort to extend the right of life and health to all people.”
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Since then, Tedros has given public support to some of Pope Francis’ own messages regarding the response to COVID-19, including the Pope’s August 19, 2020 weekly audience, in which he called for the “pandemic” response to include focusing on “social injustice and environmental damage.” Tedros praised the Pontiff’s message, in which the Pope also outlined that only industries which met specific criteria should be assisted to recover after the COVID-19 related restrictions. The criteria were: “those which contribute to the inclusion of the excluded, to the promotion of the last, to the common good and the care of creation.”
I couldn’t agree more with Your Holiness @Pontifex. The #COVID19 pandemic shows that we must make health a human right for all and not allow it to be a privilege for the few. It also gives us an opportunity to rebuild a better, safer, fairer world – together! https://t.co/6gY0QlFm8p
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) August 20, 2020
While at their 2018 Tedros and Francis spoke about “healthcare,” Tedros’ definition of the term is different to the Catholic understanding of the word, since he strongly advocates for abortion. Following the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which overturned Roe v. Wade and rolled back the advances of the U.S. abortion industry, Tedros criticized the decision.
“Restricting [abortion] drives women and girls toward unsafe abortions resulting in complications, even death,” he declared during a press briefing following the Supreme Court ruling. Describing the reversal of Roe v. Wade as a step “backwards,” Tedros argued that abortion should be understood as healthcare, the Associated Press reported.
“The global impact is also a concern,” Tedros added. “This is about the life of mother. If safe abortion is illegal, then women will definitely resort to unsafe ways of doing it. And that means it could cost them their lives.”
He had previously told Reuters on the day of the infamous pro-abortion ruling’s overturning that “I am very disappointed, because women’s rights must be protected. And I would have expected America to protect such rights.”
Both Pope Francis and Tedros share similar outlooks with regard to COVID-19 issues, with even the Pope famously advocating for people to receive doses of the abortion-tainted injections which were promoted globally by the WHO.
READ: Pope Francis tells ‘global governance’ conference there can be no ‘return to normality’ after COVID
While Francis has increased his links to the WHO and other global organizations such as the U.N. and the World Economic Forum, the WHO has come under fire for its attempts to secure even more global power via the new amendments in the WHO’s International Health Regulations. Proposed by the Biden administration, the new amendments would “empower the WHO’s Director-General to declare health emergencies or crises in any nation and to do so unilaterally and against the opposition of the target nation.”
Tedros, during a 2021 special session of the World Health Assembly, revealed his desire for the WHO to gain control over international actions. “The world needs a strengthened, empowered and sustainably financed WHO, at the centre of the global health architecture,” he said. “The widening mismatch between the expectations of WHO and its resources is well-known. COVID-19 must be the catalyst to rectify it.”
He called on WHO members to support moves for “sustainable financing,” – a topic about which LifeSite has already highlighted the international concerns – and stated that: “One of the greatest risks to global health security now is to further weaken WHO or to further fragment the global health architecture.”
Pope Francis has echoed Tedros’ arguments on numerous occasions. In a 2021 address to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, he called for “global governance” in light of COVID-19, strongly advocating for universal vaccines, and bemoaned the “ecological debt” which is owed to “nature itself.”
Francis also renewed his frequent call for a paradigm shift in global politics, saying: “there remains an urgent need for a global plan that can create new or regenerate existing institutions, particularly those of global governance, and help to build a new network of international relations for advancing the integral human development of all peoples.”
He also called on the COP26 climate change conference to urgently pursue the goals of the pro-abortion 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Francis’ lines seemed to echo the sentiments expressed by key globalist and founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Klaus Schwab, whose proposed anti-Catholic “Great Reset,” is underpinned by a focus on a green financial agenda, as he mentions the “withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies,” and a new financial system based on “investments” which advance “equality and sustainability,” and the building of a “‘green’ urban infrastructure.”
Schwab, the IMF, and scores of the world’s most influential banks (including the World Bank), have in fact already committed themselves to enforcing the green agenda of the Great Reset, and look set to make adherence to such green policies a criteria for access to finance in the future.