By José Antonio Ureta
By consenting to church closures, the Vatican has contributed to increasing the climate of panic vis-a-vis the coronavirus epidemic. With his repeated calls for integral ecology and a new model of globalization, plus his support of the so-called “popular movements” in Latin America, Pope Francis is giving spiritual backing to the most massive social engineering operation in history. These are the main denunciations the Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira Institute has issued against the top leadership of the Catholic Church in a documented study recently on its website.
The article blames the Vatican for contributing to increasing the climate of panic that paved the way for the coercive confinement measures that will cause a severe economic and social crisis. In applying restrictive measures, Vatican authorities and the Italian hierarchy went beyond the requirements of civil authorities. Deprivation of the sacraments and spiritual consolation that prayer provides inside a church could only increase anguish in the face of the epidemic and, indirectly, induce panic, says the IPCO document. It was released before Pope Francis’ egregious support just given to the Italian Prime Minister, in contrast with the attitude of the bishops.
The organization, which is part of the Tradition Family Property movement, says that the main beneficiaries of the crisis generated by the epidemic that started in Wuhan are the communist regime in China, radical ecologists, promoters of world governance, and sectors of the extreme left. A window of opportunity has opened for these four actors who aim to shape a “new world” according to their ideological agenda.
According to the organization, in Europe and elsewhere, panic has successfully led populations to take a submissive attitude vis-a-vis the severe restrictions on freedom that authorities have imposed on roughly two-thirds of the world population. Surveys reckon that panic has also led people to accept plans for State control through smartphone apps as a condition to get out of what the IMF director called the “Great Confinement.”
How can one understand, the document asks, that “only three months ago, the West’s masses were inebriated with the values of emancipation, autonomy, and individualism, and now they accept the prospect of Chinese communist-style?” Their natural reaction should be that of the French agnostic philosopher Comte-Sponville: “I’d rather catch COVID-19 in a free country than be spared from it in a totalitarian State!”
Instead, polls show an increase in the popularity of governments that have imposed restrictions and plan to reinforce control over people by offering in return to open the taps of public funding to provide state aid.
According to the Plinio Côrrea de Oliveira Institute, this resembles a planetary version of the Stockholm Syndrome by which a kidnapping victim develops a relationship of complicity and a strong emotional bond with his captor. It is a psychological phenomenon that may be accompanied by a collective preternatural infestation, as described by Msgr. Léon Cristiani in his book Evidence of Satan in the Modern World.
From the natural point of view, this unprecedented operation of mental manipulation on a world scale seems to obey the tactics that Plinio Côrrea de Oliveira denounced more than half a century ago in his essay, Unperceived Ideological Transshipment and Dialogue. That is done primarily by employing what he called the “fear-sympathy syndrome.”
Applying the teachings of the Brazilian intellectual to the ongoing operation of ideological transshipment, on the one hand, we would have a fear of Covid-19. And on the other hand, a romantic aspiration to return to a more “respectful of nature,” more “open” and “supportive” world, in which the luxury standards of industrialized “bourgeois” societies would give way to the simplicity and frugality of a lifestyle praised by the “greens.”
In its final term, the ideological transfer should lead people not only to be resigned in the face of economic “degrowth,” as if this were a fatality but to accept the new lifestyle as spiritual improvement. In this context, Pope Francis becomes a precious ally for the success of the operation, by issuing statements such as “I don’t know if these [catastrophes like the coronavirus] are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s response.” “I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption,” and his calls for an “ integral ecological conversion ” and support of movements such as Greta Thunberg’s.
The same can be said of the Vatican’s contribution to those seeking to take advantage of the coronavirus crisis to advance the world governance agenda. The IPCO document transcribes a statement by Jacques Attali, advisor to all French presidents for the past 40 years. He wrote in 2009 that “humanity does not evolve significantly until it is truly afraid,” which is why epidemics help laying to lay the foundations “of a true world government” much faster. In other words, what former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested earlier: a temporary form of world government to face the current medical and economic crises.
That is also the gist, although in more moderate tones, of a joint statement by the Pontifical Academies of Science and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, led by Most Rev. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentine bishop very close to the Pontiff. “Global problems such as pandemics or the less visible crises of global climate change and biodiversity loss demand global cooperative responses,” says the document, insisting that “global crises demand collective action.”
The great promoters of a new world order under the UN aegis would have no difficulty subscribing to this declaration by the two Vatican Academies, which includes no mention of God!
“I want to tell you that I’m always available to lend a hand. Count on me” was Pope Francis’ disconcerting message to Luca Casarini, an Italian leader of the extreme left. The pontiff issued it on Easter Sunday with another message to so-called social movements, in which he states that “this may be the time to consider a universal basic income,” a central idea of the radical left. (Pablo Iglesias, vice-president of Spain and leader of Podemos, welcomed the statement. Earlier, he had suggested the government should take advantage of the coronavirus crisis to nationalize all electric utilities, communication companies, hotels, and private clinics.)
“If the fight against the coronavirus is a war,” Pope Francis added in his message to the social movements, “you are a true invisible army that fights in the most dangerous trenches.”
With a language close to that of green parties and the radical left, upon announcing the creation of working groups to prepare for the aftermath of Covid-19, Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, explained that “inhabiting the Earth as a common home requires much more. It requires solidarity in accessing the goods of creation as a ‘common good,’ and solidarity in applying the fruits of research and technology to make our ‘Home’ healthier and more livable for all.”
The IPCO report accuses western governments of paving the way for this huge social engineering operation by taking drastic confinement measures with enormous social and economic costs, based only on mathematical models built on uncertain data. Indeed, as Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, wrote in an article in the Financial Times, this sudden halt in economic activity will lead to “a tragedy of biblical proportions.”
One of the aspects not mentioned in this tragedy is the effect that economic paralysis will have on extremely poor segments of the population in the least developed areas of the planet. In them, the number of poor will increase by half a billion people, annihilating the progress made in the last three decades. David Beasly, WFP Executive Director, in an interview with The Guardian, exclaimed: “My goodness, this is a perfect storm. We are looking at widespread famines of biblical proportions.”
In the first months of 2020, an average of 30,800 people living in extreme poverty have already died of hunger every day. If extreme poverty is doubled, the number of daily hunger victims will necessarily double as well. In other words, 60,000 malnourished people would be dying every single day. These 30,000 additional daily deaths represent almost five times more than the victims of Covid-19 on the worst day of the pandemic, April 5, when 6,367 deaths were recorded in the whole world.
Also absurd was the WHO’s recommendation to temporarily suspend massive vaccination campaigns to avoid social contact and thus prevent the spread of Sars-Cov-2. The result is that millions of children have been deprived of their polio, measles, papilloma, yellow fever, cholera, and meningitis vaccines. This will lead to the uncontrolled spread of these contagious diseases, with their sequel of physical disabilities and deaths.
The world would have avoided a considerable number of these deficiencies and deaths, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s disciples assert, if instead of listening only to WHO ayatollahs and media outlets, authorities had heeded other experts who suggested “vertical” or “smart” confinement measures. These would protect the population at risk (the elderly and those with serious diseases) and confine those infected by the virus only after carrying out thousands of tests. As The Wall Street Journal headlined, “No Society Can Safeguard Public Health for Long at the Cost of Its Economic Health.”
Even less can any society preserve public health at the expense of spiritual health – and notably when religious authorities contribute to its weakness.
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Full text of IPCO’s statement
There are many things that I love about our Pope but the collaboration with the forces that will send us back into the Catacombs is not one of them. This and John Rao’s article offer some fairly clear thinking about the unintended consequences of the misguided submission to totalitarian views wrapped in the sheep’s clothing of “social justice”. Our faith and indeed our Church is nourished by the promise that we will find Christ where two or more are gathered in His name. How ironic is it then that the celebration of the Resurrection was conducted in empty churches conforming to the notion that death may be the victor after all? I suppose that both Pentin and Rao will be villainized as knuckle dragging flat world nincompoops, but, such is the language of the leftists among us who insist that science need not have anything to do with reason and that the only way to love our neighbor is to assure that everyone is brought to the rigidly measured safety of the lowest common denominator where the only thing anyone has to share is their justly apportioned ration of suffering. Thank you for reminding us that as Christians we ought pray for strength, not ease and that we ought rethink the consequences of surrendering to hysteria to the extent that we are voluntarily forfeiting every opportunity we might have to gather in His Name.