Faucism at the Vatican - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Faucism at the Vatican
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Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks at Vatican health conference on COVID-19, May 6, 2021 (YouTube screenshot)

Pope Francis is often cast as an “outsider,” even as his Vatican increasingly serves as a salon for the most insular of insiders. This week the Vatican held an online conference for the global elite entitled “Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul. How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health.” The event attracted a who’s who of prominent progressives, many of whom are anti-Catholic secularists. Speakers included Chelsea Clinton, Jane Goodall, the Aerosmith rock star Joe Perry, and, of course, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Pope Francis, in the eyes of progressives, is a very useful left-wing propagandist, a fact that Fauci implied in his speech to the conference. The pope, he acknowledged, can reach audiences that he can’t: “You have someone who’s a deeply religious person who will listen to their clergy. That’s different than me with a suit going into an area telling people to do something.”

The Vatican’s supernatural mission has been replaced by a laser-like focus on the left-wing goals of the United Nations and the international liberal elite.

Fauci, according to the Catholic News Agency, responded to questions from CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, one of the many liberal media darlings enlisted to moderate the event. Fauci complained that some don’t “appreciate the evolution of understanding and the evolution of knowledge, that you’re going to change some of your viewpoints because the data itself will not necessarily change, but additional data changes the status of your knowledge.”

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, served as a host of the event. “More lenses are needed to bring into focus a complete picture of being and existence,” he said to the press, explaining the need for the conference. What an absurd claim. That the Vatican regards Chelsea Clinton and company as experts on being and existence speaks volumes about its politicized mission under Pope Francis.

The Vatican’s supernatural mission has been replaced by a laser-like focus on the left-wing goals of the United Nations and the international liberal elite. Those goals, often presented under the guise of this or that emergency, will not Christianize the world but liberalize it under the tyrannical whims of central planners like Anthony Fauci. The Church is supposed to stand as a buffer against tyranny, not facilitate it. Under previous popes, the Vatican resisted partnerships with a pagan political order. But under Pope Francis that resistance has dissolved.

The Faucis see Francis as a post-Christian pope for a post-Christian age. He is not the “people’s pope,” as the press likes to say, but the elite’s pope, an elite that is determined to exploit the Church for its own ideological purposes. Even Saul Alinsky, who pioneered the exploitation of the Church for political purposes, would marvel, were he alive today, at the Vatican’s eagerness in erecting the Left’s Towers of Babel.

What the Faucis most appreciate in this pope is that he offers them the cover of religion without any of its encroaching obligations. The self-proclaimed health police shut down churches arbitrarily and called them “not essential,” and yet this pope still rolls out the red carpet for these secularist-minded pols and bureaucrats.

The pope has signaled that the Church will take its place at the table of the UN-pushed “great reset” and even set that table. Never mind that that means trusting the collectivist judgments of central planners with an antipathy for Catholic teaching on the natural moral law. The popes of the past would have recoiled from such a dubious project. But this pope favors an emboldened global leftism. He has tweeted out the phrase “build back better,” which is Joe Biden’s slogan for the reset.

“We cannot return to the false securities of the political and economic systems we had before the crisis,” Pope Francis has written. “We need economies that give to all access to the fruits of creation, to the basic needs of life: to land, lodging and labor.”

How dismally far we have come from Pope John Paul II’s warning about a “culture of death” and Pope Benedict XVI’s opposition to a “dictatorship of relativism.” The “great reset” combines the worst of those currents. As we have already seen under Joe Biden, to “build back better” means to support abortion, sabotage the traditional family, and foment a transgender revolution.

The Vatican’s comically worldly conference this week is part of the “great reset” juggernaut. It is not even remotely a Catholic exposition of “being and existence” but a denial of what the Church has always taught, which is that the common good hangs on adherence to God’s intentions for mankind, not statist schemes. What possible wisdom could come from “health” experts like Fauci who consider the killing of unborn children an essential part of “health care”?

The “health” establishment has never been more wedded to the culture of death. Holding a Vatican conference on health without engaging that topic, much less recruiting pro-abortion speakers to headline it, would have been unthinkable under previous pontificates. Not anymore. The Vatican has gone from a moral and spiritual bastion to an annex of the United Nations.

George Neumayr
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
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