MAY 11, 2021
Pope Francis’ New Age Holistic Health Conference on “Exploring the Mind, Body and Soul”
This report is a follow-up to
REPORTED BY DR JULES GOMES-POPE FRANCIS POISED TO ENDORSE NEW AGE ALTERNATIVE MEDICATIONS AND MEDITATIONS AND THEIR PROPONENTS
REPORTED BY DR JULES GOMES-POPE FRANCIS POISED TO ENDORSE NEW AGE ALTERNATIVE MEDICATIONS AND MEDITATIONS AND THEIR PROPONENTS-02
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE NEW AGE-PRO-ABORTION VATICAN CONFERENCE? CLICK ON
https://vaticanconference2021.org/
The Fifth International Vatican Conference on Exploring the Mind, Body and Soul is true to the spirit of Pope Francis’ 2015 New Age eco-encyclical Laudato si’.
In my 2021 New Age Compendium 2.0, (THE SPIRITUAL DECEPTIONS OF THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT AND WHAT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS PRONOUNCED ON THEM. New Age Alternative Medicines, Eastern Meditations and Psychospiritual Techniques, their Philosophies, Practices and allied commercial Products) you will find the following information:
Chapter 26.
Green Religion. Earth-centred Retreats/Meditations, Eco-spirituality/Green Spirituality/Creation Spirituality, Eco-feminism, and Deep or Depth Ecology: The worship of Mother Earth or Gaia
Pope Francis’ 24 May 2015 New Age eco-encyclical Laudato si’ [NEW]
Francis, the New Age Pope. The Shamazon Sin-nod. The Pachamama (=Mother Earth) Idol [NEW]
STOP PRESS – APRIL 16, 2021: Pope Francis to convene “health conference” promoting “Hindu Vedic meditation, New Age spirituality, alternative medicine and yoga”
[NEW]
Press Release of the Pontifical Council for Culture, 15.04.2021
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2021/04/15/210415b.html
The Fifth International Conference:
Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul.
How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health.
The Pontifical Council for Culture and the Cura Foundation are organizing the Fifth International Conference on the theme: Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul. How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health. The Conference will take place virtually from 6 to 8 May 2021, and bring together physicians, scientists, ethicists, religious leaders, patient rights advocates, policymakers, philanthropists and commentators to discuss the latest breakthroughs in medicine, healthcare delivery and prevention, as well as the human implications and cultural impact of technological advances. The organizers will also promote a roundtable on “Bridging Science and Faith”, aimed at exploring the relationship of religion and spirituality to health and wellbeing, including the relationship between mind, body and soul. The discussion will deal with the deeper meaning of human existence and seek areas of convergence between the humanities and the natural sciences. At the conclusion of the Conference, Pope Francis will address a video message to the participants. Priests, pastoral health care workers and students from Pontifical and Catholic Universities worldwide are invited to take part in the Conference. More detailed information can be found on the website of the Pontifical Council for Culture: www.cultura.va and at: VaticanConference2021.org.
Vatican plans conference on holistic healing
https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=50498
April 15, 2021
CWN Editor’s Note: The Vatican has announced plans for a major international conference on holistic medicine, to take place in May. The conference, cosponsored by the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Cura Foundation, will feature an eclectic list of speakers including Anthony Fauci, New Age
theorist Deepak Chopra, Google Health founder David Feinberg, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and Chelsea Clinton.
Continue to this story on Vatican Press Office
In my 2021 New Age Compendium 2.0, (THE SPIRITUAL DECEPTIONS OF THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT AND WHAT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS PRONOUNCED ON THEM. New Age Alternative Medicines, Eastern Meditations and Psychospiritual Techniques, their Philosophies, Practices and allied commercial Products) you will find the following information:
Section D.
The New Age paradigms of Holism, Wholeness and Holistic Health
Chapter 55. Deepak Chopra and Quantum Healing
Viganò on Vatican ‘health’ conference with Fauci: Holy See is ‘making itself the servant of the New World Order’
The result is the super-imposition over the true Church of a sect of heretical and depraved Modernists who are intent on legitimizing adultery, sodomy, abortion, euthanasia, idolatry, and any perversion of the intellect and will. The true Church is now eclipsed, denied and discredited by her very Pastors, betrayed even by the one who occupies the highest Throne.
Archbishop
Carlo Maria Viganò, April 20, 2021
From May 6-8, 2021, the fifth International Vatican Conference will take place, entitled Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul. Unite to Prevent & Unite to Cure. A Global Health Care Initiative: How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health. The event is being hosted by the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Cura Foundation, the Science and Faith Foundation, and Stem for Life.
Michael Haynes of LifeSiteNews has reported (here) on the topics to be addressed and the participants, including the infamous Anthony Fauci, whose scandalous conflicts of interest did not prevent him from taking over the management of the pandemic in the United States; Chelsea Clinton, a follower of the Church of Satan and a staunch abortion advocate; the New Age guru Deepak Chopra; Dame Jane Goodall, environmentalist and chimpanzee expert; the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna; representatives of Big Tech; and a whole slew of abortionists, Malthusians, and globalists known to the general public. The conference has recruited five prominent journalists to be moderators, who are exclusively from left-wing media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, CBS and Forbes.
This Conference – along with the Council for Inclusive Capitalism of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Global Compact on Education, and the inter-religious Pantheon to be held in June in Astana, Kazakhstan – is the umpteenth scandalous confirmation of a disturbing departure of the current Hierarchy, and in particular its highest Roman members, from Catholic orthodoxy. The Holy See has deliberately renounced the supernatural mission of the Church, making itself the servant of the New World Order and Masonic globalism in an antichristic counter-magisterium. The same Roman Dicasteries, occupied by people ideologically aligned with Jorge Mario Bergoglio and protected and promoted by him, now continue unrestrained in their implacable work of demolishing Faith, Morals, ecclesiastical discipline, and monastic and religious life, in an effort as vain as it is unprecedented to transform the Bride of Christ into a philanthropic association enslaved to the Strong Powers. The result is the super-imposition over the true Church of a sect of heretical and depraved Modernists who are intent on legitimizing adultery, sodomy, abortion, euthanasia, idolatry, and any perversion of the intellect and will. The true Church is now eclipsed, denied and discredited by her very Pastors, betrayed even by the one who occupies the highest Throne.
The fact that the deep church has managed to elect its own member so as to carry out this infernal plan in agreement with the deep state is no longer a mere suspicion, but a phenomenon which it is now essential to ask questions about and shed light on. The submission of the Cathedra veritatis to the interests of the Masonic elite is manifesting itself in all its evidence, in the deafening silence of the Sacred Pastors and in the bewilderment of the People of God, who have been abandoned to themselves.
Further demonstration of this degenerate libido serviendi of the Vatican towards the globalist ideology is the choice of speakers to give testimonials and lectures: supporters of abortion, of the use of fetal material in research, of demographic decline, of the pan-sexual LGBT agenda, and last but not least, of the narrative of Covid and the so-called vaccines. Cardinal Ravasi, the President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, is certainly one of the leading representatives of the deep church and Modernist progressivism, as well as an advocate of dialogue with the infamous Masonic sect and a promoter of the famous Courtyard of the Gentiles. It is therefore not surprising that included among the organizers of the event is the Stem for Life Foundation, which proudly defines itself as “a nonsectarian, nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization focused on creating a movement to accelerate development of cell therapies.”
On closer inspection, the sectarianism and partisanship of the Vatican Conference are made evident by the topic it addresses, the conclusions it seeks to draw, its participants, and its sponsors. Even the image chosen to promote the Conference is extremely eloquent: a close-up of Michelangelo’s fresco of Creation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in which the hand of God the Father reaches out towards the hand of Adam, but with both hands covered by disposable surgical gloves, recalling the regulations of the new “health liturgy” and implying that even the Lord Himself might spread the virus.
In this sacrilegious representation, the order of Creation is subverted into therapeutic anti-creation, in which man saves himself and becomes the mad author of his own health “redemption.” Instead of the purifying laver of Baptism, the Covid religion proposes the vaccine, the bearer of disabilities and death, as the only means of salvation. Instead of Faith in the Revelation of God, we find superstition and the irrational assent to precepts that have nothing scientific about them, with rites and liturgies that mimic true Religion in a sacrilegious parody.
This choice of imagery has an aberrant and blasphemous ring to it, because it uses a well-known and evocative image to insinuate and promote a false and tendentious narrative that says that in the presence of a seasonal flu, whose virus has still not been isolated according to Koch’s postulates (here) and that can be effectively cured using existing treatments, it is necessary to administer vaccines that are admitted to be ineffective and that are still in the experimentation phase, with unknown side-effects, and whose producers have obtained a criminal shield of immunity for their distribution. The victims immolated on the altar of the health Moloch, from children dismembered in the third month of pregnancy in order to produce the gene serum to the thousands of people who have been killed or maimed, do not stop the infernal machine of Big Pharma, and it is to be feared that there will be a resurgence of the phenomenon over the next few months.
One wonders if Bergoglio’s zeal for the dissemination of the gene serum is not also motivated by base economic reasons, as compensation for the losses suffered by the Vatican and the Dioceses following the lockdown and the collapse of attendance by the faithful at Mass and the Sacraments. On the other hand, if Rome’s silence about the violation of human and religious rights in China has been paid for by the Beijing dictatorship with substantial prebends, nothing prevents the replication of this scheme on a large scale in exchange for the Vatican’s promotion of the vaccines.
The Conference will obviously take great care not to mention even indirectly the perennial teaching of the Magisterium on moral and doctrinal questions of the greatest importance. Conversely, the sycophantic praise of the worldly mentality and the prevailing ideology will be the only voice, along with the amorphous ecumenical repertoire inspired by the New Age.
I note that in 2003 the same Pontifical Council for Culture condemned yoga meditation and, more generally, New Age thought as being incompatible with the Catholic faith. According to the Vatican document, New Age thought “shares with a number of internationally influential groups the goal of superseding or transcending particular religions in order to create space for a universal religion which could unite humanity. Closely related to this is a very concerted effort on the part of many institutions to invent a Global Ethic, an ethical framework which would reflect the global nature of contemporary culture, economics and politics.
Further, the politicization of ecological questions certainly colors the whole question of the Gaia hypothesis or worship of mother earth” (2.5). It goes without saying that the pagan ceremonies with which Saint Peter’s Basilica was profaned in honor of the Pachamama idol fit perfectly into that “politicization of ecological questions” denounced by the 2003 Vatican document, and which today is instead promoted sine glossa by the so-called Bergoglian magisterium, beginning with Laudato Sì’ and Fratelli Tutti.
At La Salette, Our Lady warned us: “Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.” It will not be the Holy Church, indefectible by the promises of Christ, that will lose the Faith: it will be the sect that occupies the See of Most Blessed Peter and which today we see propagating the anti-gospel of the New World Order.
It is no longer possible to remain silent, because today our silence would make us accomplices of the enemies of God and of the human race. Millions of faithful are disgusted by the countless scandals of the Pastors, by the betrayal of their mission, by the desertion of those who by Holy Orders are called to bear witness to the Holy Gospel and not to support the establishment of the kingdom of the Antichrist.
I beg my Brothers in the Episcopate, priests, religious, and in a particular way the faithful laity who see themselves being betrayed by the Hierarchy, to raise their voices so as to express with a spirit of true obedience to Our Lord, Head of the Mystical Body, a firm and courageous denunciation of this apostasy and its authors. I invite everyone to pray that the Divine Majesty may be moved to compassion and intervene in our aid. May the Most Holy Virgin, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata, intercede before the Throne of God, compensating with Her merits for the unworthiness of Her children who invoke Her with the glorious title of Auxilium Christianorum.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
20 April 2021
Feria Tertia infra Hebdomadam II
post Octavam Paschae
Abp. Viganò: Deeclaration on ‘Fifth International Vatican Conference’
Vatican pushing globalist propaganda
Archbishop
Carlo Maria Viganò, April 21, 2021
From May 6–8, 2021, the Fifth International Vatican Conference will take place, entitled “Exploring the Mind, Body and Soul. Unite to Prevent and Unite to Cure. A Global Health Care Initiative: How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health.” The event is being hosted by the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Cura Foundation, the Science and Faith Foundation and Stem for Life. Michael Haynes of LifeSiteNews has reported (here) on the topics to be addressed and the participants — including the infamous Anthony Fauci, whose scandalous conflicts of interest did not prevent him from taking over the management of the pandemic in the United States; Chelsea Clinton, a follower of the Church of Satan and a staunch abortion advocate; the New Age guru Deepak Chopra; Dame Jane Goodall, environmentalist and chimpanzee expert; the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna; representatives of Big Tech; and a whole slew of abortionists, Malthusians and globalists known to the general public. The conference has recruited five prominent journalists to be moderators, who are exclusively from left-wing media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, CBS and Forbes.
This conference (along with the Council for Inclusive Capitalism of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Global Compact on Education and the Inter-Religious Pantheon to be held in June in Astana, Kazakhstan) is the umpteenth scandalous confirmation of a disturbing departure of the current Hierarchy, and, in particular, its highest Roman members, from Catholic orthodoxy. The Holy See has deliberately renounced the supernatural mission of the Church, making itself the servant of the New World Order and Masonic globalism in an antichristic counter-magisterium. The same Roman dicasteries, occupied by people ideologically aligned with Jorge Mario Bergoglio and protected and promoted by him, now continue unrestrained in their implacable work of demolishing faith, morals, ecclesiastical discipline and monastic and religious life, in an effort as vain as it is unprecedented to transform the Bride of Christ into a philanthropic association enslaved to the strong powers. The result is the superimposition over the true Church of a sect of heretical and depraved modernists who are intent on legitimizing adultery, sodomy, abortion, euthanasia, idolatry and any perversion of the intellect and will. The true Church is now eclipsed, denied and discredited by her very pastors, betrayed even by the one who occupies the highest throne.
The fact that the deep church has managed to elect its own member so as to carry out this infernal plan in agreement with the deep state is no longer a mere suspicion, but a phenomenon which it is now essential to ask questions about and shed light on. The submission of the Cathedra veritatis to the interests of the Masonic elite is manifesting itself in all its evidence, in the deafening silence of the sacred pastors and in the bewilderment of the people of God, who have been abandoned to themselves.
Further demonstration of this degenerate libido serviendi of the Vatican towards the globalist ideology is the choice of speakers to give testimonials and lectures: supporters of abortion, of the use of fetal material in research, of demographic decline, of the pansexual LGBT agenda, and, last but not least, of the narrative of COVID and the so-called vaccines. Cardinal Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, is certainly one of the leading representatives of the deep church and modernist progressivism, as well as an advocate of dialogue with the infamous Masonic sect and a promoter of the famous Courtyard of the Gentiles. It is, therefore, not surprising that included among the organizers of the event is the Stem for Life Foundation, which proudly defines itself as a “nonsectarian, nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization focused on creating a movement to accelerate development of cell therapies.” On closer inspection, the sectarianism and partisanship of the Vatican conference are made evident by the topic it addresses, the conclusions it seeks to draw, its participants and its sponsors. Even the image chosen to promote the conference is extremely eloquent: a close-up of Michelangelo’s fresco of creation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in which the hand of God the Father reaches out towards the hand of Adam, but with both hands covered by disposable surgical gloves, recalling the regulations of the new “health liturgy” and implying that even the Lord Himself might spread the virus.
In this sacrilegious representation, the order of Creation is subverted into therapeutic anti-creation, in which man saves himself and becomes the mad author of his own health “redemption.” Instead of the purifying laver of baptism, the COVID religion proposes the vaccine, the bearer of disabilities and death, as the only means of salvation. Instead of faith in the revelation of God, we find superstition and the irrational assent to precepts that have nothing scientific about them, with rites and liturgies that mimic true religion in a sacrilegious parody.
This choice of imagery has an aberrant and blasphemous ring to it, because it uses a well-known and evocative image to insinuate and promote a false and tendentious narrative that says that in the presence of a seasonal flu, whose virus has still not been isolated according to Koch’s postulates (here) and that can be effectively cured using existing treatments, it is necessary to administer vaccines that are admitted to be ineffective and that are still in the experimentation phase, with unknown side-effects and whose producers have obtained a criminal shield of immunity for their distribution. The victims immolated on the altar of the health to Moloch — from children dismembered in the third month of pregnancy in order to produce the gene serum to the thousands of people who have been killed or maimed — do not stop the infernal machine of “Big Pharma,” and it is to be feared that there will be a resurgence of the phenomenon over the next few months.
One wonders if Bergoglio’s zeal for the dissemination of the gene serum is not also motivated by base economic reasons, as compensation for the losses suffered by the Vatican and the dioceses following the lockdown and the collapse of attendance by the faithful at Mass and the sacraments. On the other hand, if Rome’s silence about the violation of human and religious rights in China has been paid for by the Beijing dictatorship with substantial prebends, nothing prevents the replication of this scheme on a large scale in exchange for the Vatican’s promotion of the vaccines.
The conference will obviously take great care not to mention even indirectly the perennial teaching of the Magisterium on moral and doctrinal questions of the greatest importance. Conversely, the sycophantic praise of the worldly mentality and the prevailing ideology will be the only voice, along with the amorphous ecumenical repertoire inspired by the New Age.
I note that in 2003, the same Pontifical Council for Culture condemned yoga meditation and, more generally, New Age thought as being incompatible with the Catholic faith. According to the Vatican document, New Age thought:
Shares with a number of internationally influential groups the goal of superseding or transcending particular religions in order to create space for a universal religion which could unite humanity. Closely related to this is a very concerted effort on the part of many institutions to invent a global ethic, an ethical framework which would reflect the global nature of contemporary culture, economics and politics. Further, the politicization of ecological questions certainly colors the whole question of the Gaia hypothesis or worship of mother earth.
It goes without saying that the pagan ceremonies with which Saint Peter’s Basilica was profaned in honor of the Pachamama idol fit perfectly into that “politicization of ecological questions” denounced by the 2003 Vatican document and which today is instead promoted sine glossa by the so-called Bergoglian magisterium, beginning with Laudato Sì and Fratelli Tutti.
At La Salette, Our Lady warned us: “Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.” It will not be the Holy Church, indefectible by the promises of Christ, that will lose the Faith: It will be the sect that occupies the See of Most Blessed Peter and which today we see propagating the antigospel of the New World Order. It is no longer possible to remain silent because today our silence would make us accomplices of the enemies of God and of the human race. Millions of faithful are disgusted by the countless scandals of the pastors, by the betrayal of their mission, by the desertion of those who by Holy Orders are called to bear witness to the holy gospel and not to support the establishment of the kingdom of the Antichrist.
I beg my brothers in the episcopate, priests, religious and, in a particular way, the faithful laity who see themselves being betrayed by the Hierarchy, to raise their voices so as to express with a spirit of true obedience to Our Lord, Head of the Mystical Body, a firm and courageous denunciation of this apostasy and its authors. I invite everyone to pray that the Divine Majesty may be moved to compassion and intervene in our aid. May the Most Holy Virgin, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata, intercede before the throne of God, compensating with her merits for the unworthiness of her children who invoke her with the glorious title of Auxilium Christianorum.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
20 April 2021
Feria Tertia infra Hebdomadam II
post Octavam Paschae
Petition asks Vatican to cancel ‘health’ conference featuring abortion activists, Fauci, Big Tech oligarchs
Chelsea Clinton, Cindy Crawford, Jane Goodall, and CEOs from Pfizer and Moderna are among the speakers.
Victoria Gisondi, April 23, 2021
A new petition from LifeSite asks the Vatican to cancel its upcoming “health” conference featuring a slew of globalist and pro-abortion speakers, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chelsea Clinton, and the CEO of abortion pill-producing drug company Pfizer.
The theme of the conference this year is Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul. It will be held “virtually” from May 6 to 8. The cover photo on the conference website features a spoof of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in which the hands of God and Adam are both covered in rubber gloves.
Vatican News describes the event as bringing “together physicians, scientists, ethicists, religious leaders, patient rights advocates, policymakers, philanthropists and commentators to discuss the status quo in medical research and technology, and how these are implemented at a global level.”
A special opening conversation on “shaping the future of healthcare for a healthier world” will be hosted by the experimental vaccine-pushing, double-masking Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has assured the World Health Organization that the Biden regime is committed to funding abortions.
Clinton, vice chair of the corrupt, pro-abortion Clinton Foundation, is on the list of speakers along with former super-model Cindy Crawford, a public supporter of abortion who has attended events to benefit the National Abortion League. Crawford is also famous for posing nude.
Population control advocate Jane Goodall will also speak.
Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of tech giant Salesforce, is on the list of speakers. Salesforce has discriminated against and maligned conservatives who questioned the integrity of the elections.
Another speaker is Albert Bourla, chairman and CEO of Pfizer. In addition to making an abortion-tainted experimental coronavirus mRNA vaccine, Pfizer also makes an abortion pill.
Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, also has a place of honor along with Dr. David Feinberg, head of Google Health.
The speakers are so unapologetically anti-Catholic this year that Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò said the Holy See is “making itself the servant of the New World Order.”
“The fact that the deep church has managed to elect its own member so as to carry out this infernal plan in agreement with the deep state is no longer a mere suspicion, but a phenomenon which it is now essential to ask questions about and shed light on,” Viganò expressed in a letter published by LifeSiteNews. “The submission of the Cathedra veritatis to the interests of the Masonic elite is manifesting itself in all its evidence, in the deafening silence of the Sacred Pastors and in the bewilderment of the People of God, who have been abandoned to themselves.”
“Further demonstration of this degenerate libido serviendi of the Vatican towards the globalist ideology is the choice of speakers to give testimonials and lectures: supporters of abortion, of the use of fetal material in research, of demographic decline, of the pan-sexual LGBT agenda, and last but not least, of the narrative of Covid and the so-called vaccines,” the archbishop continued.
Commenting on the conference’s main image of The Creation of Man with God’s and Adam’s hands masked, Viganò wrote, “In this sacrilegious representation, the order of Creation is subverted into therapeutic anti-creation, in which man saves himself and becomes the mad author of his own health ‘redemption.’ Instead of the purifying laver of Baptism, the Covid religion proposes the vaccine, the bearer of disabilities and death, as the only means of salvation. Instead of Faith in the Revelation of God, we find superstition and the irrational assent to precepts that have nothing scientific about them, with rites and liturgies that mimic true Religion in a sacrilegious parody.”
LifeSite’s petition asking the Vatican to cancel the conference notes that the event is so “beyond an outrage, it is a closer to a sacrilege.” The petition and more information can be found here.
Vatican put its logo on much that wasn’t Catholic at Vatican Health Conference
If anyone mentioned the Holy Name of Jesus during the Vatican conference, I must have been working on my Chelsea Clinton story, for I never heard it uttered.
Dorothy Cummings McLean May 11, 2021
At some point during the three days I watched the pre-recorded online 2021 Vatican Health Conference, I noticed the product placement.
Some of it was rather innocent, really. While looking at the décor of the homes or offices behind the participants, I began to notice the carefully placed books for sale. One was fetchingly propped up on a piano. The funny thing is that even though I knew that the guests of the Pontifical Council for Culture were angling for a sly sale, I went ahead and bought a book anyway. Well played, Dr. William Li, President, Medical Director, and CEO of the Angiogenesis Foundation. Well played.
Some of product placement was not very funny, however. The emblem of the Pontifical Council for Culture was constantly on the screen, and so it looked like a Vatican stamp of approval of everyone who spoke and of everything they said. I was rather startled on the third day when an American theology professor from Scotland’s St Andrews University said that “we can forgive people for believing in a soul,” and an American psychology professor at Yale suggested that while kids have imaginary friends, adults have God.
Now to be honest, this was top level “philosophy of the mind” stuff and a serious mental workout for a PhD drop-out like myself, but given that the Vatican was hosting this conversation, it would have been nice if they had offered a robust response by a star of Catholic philosophy like Peter Kreeft. I get that, in the closing words of conference co-host Dr. Robin Smith, the “Vatican Conference focuses on collaboration, putting differences aside, and working together to solve problems and improve human health.” However, I didn’t see a whole lot of Catholic contribution to the collaboration. Even in something as innocuous as the round-table between representatives of different religions about food, we heard from Islam, Judaism, and Mormonism (no coffee!?), but nothing about Catholic (or even Orthodox) penitential practices in Lent.
That said, Msgr. Tomasz Trafny, the Polish head of the science and faith department of the Pontifical Council for Culture, put up a polite fight against introducing “irreversible changes” to the human genome during Friday’s alarmingly entitled “Human Enhancement Round Table.” On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of push-back when the Harvard Professor of Genetics brushed aside the ideas of “natural” and “unnatural” or even a giggle when he said that “safety is the purview of the Food and Drug Administration.”
Yes, Harvard. From a strictly worldly point of view, there was an impressive line-up of participants at the Vatican health conference: American professors from Ivy League schools; international CEOs from Big Pharma; billionaires like Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems; famous soprano Renee Fleming talking about music therapy; NFL star Brandon Marshall on mental illness; supermodel Cindy Crawford on being as nice to yourself as you are to your best friend. There were also celebrated journalists and TV personalities giving masterclasses in softball interviews: Katie Couric, ABC’s Robin Roberts,
CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, ABC’s Anna Robach, Oprah’s Amos Oz. There was even royalty in the person of the Knights of Malta’s Dominique Prince de La Rochefoucald-Montbel, Jordan’s anti-cancer activist Princess Dina Mired, and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
There were a few remarks from Cardinal Ravasi, an address by Cardinal Parolin and, at the end, a speech by Pope Francis. Theirs were the biggest names representing Catholicism — and the Italian language. For an international gathering, the Fifth Vatican Conference was overwhelmingly American and anglophone. For a Vatican conference, it was strangely secular.
From a viewer’s perspective, it was also a firehose of information and opinion. There were dozens of presentations on a myriad of topics, including mRNA vaccines and gene editing, and although these were usually short, they were sometimes complex. They were rapid fire, one after other without a recess, and on Friday, I had to finally take a break in order to report that Chelsea Clinton had called for global regulation of social media so that criticism of COVID-19 vaccines could be suppressed. On Saturday I was back at the screen to see if primatologist Jane Goodall would make my next headline by saying humans are basically just chimpanzees. In fact, she said we were the “fifth great ape” and acknowledged that we are genetically “just over 1%” different from chimpanzees—and much more intelligent,” if lacking in wisdom. She hopes we will extend the Golden Rule to animals and stop trashing the planet.
Given the diversity of the topics and speakers — Cindy Crawford on food, researchers on the ethics of collecting our private medical data for the greater good of humanity — I often wondered who all this expensive intellectual largess was for. As it happens, it was for university students, particularly those associated with the Vatican’s Science and Faith (STOQ) Foundation, including those at the pontifical universities in Rome, like the Angelicum, Gregoriana, Salesianum, Urbaniana, the Laterna university, or Santa Croce. If any of them are reading this, I hope they will write in to tell me what they made of it all. Incidentally, if anyone mentioned the Holy Name of Jesus during the Vatican conference, I must have been working on my Chelsea Clinton story, for I never heard it uttered.
Meanwhile, it didn’t escape my notice that some of the companies that funded the conference also provided presentations. The Church of Latter-day Saints, whose baptisms the Catholic Church does not accept as valid, provided money, an Elder to offer the Mormon point of view in interreligious round tables, another Elder to discuss medical missionary work (very well, as it happens), and a Utah gazillionaire to discuss effective philanthropy. The latter, I feel compelled to add, was the only speaker I saw who had religious art in the background: a tasteful representation of the Lord Jesus Christ. (Pope Francis was framed by rather tacky white wallpaper.) Moderna supplied even more money than the Church of Latter-day Saints, and its CEO told us the story and workings of the abortion-tainted Moderna mRA COVID-19 vaccination. The Vatican announced that it had given him an award.
Little wonder, then, that I felt very often that the presentations were selling stuff: not just books about compassion, longevity and food-as-medicine, but the latest biotechnology, the latest telehealth software, the voluntary surrender of privacy for swifter, more effective medical treatment, COVID-19 vaccines. Although many of the projects and products discussed are undoubtedly beneficial to humanity, the crossed keys of St. Peter in the corner of the screen came to resemble the Royal Warrant or the three feathers of the Prince of Wales stamped on various British businesses, like Burberry’s fashion house or Taylor’s of Harrogate (“specialists in tea and coffee”).
POPE FRANCIS FILES AT THIS MINISTRY’S WEBSITE
AS ON
1 JUNE 2021 (700+)
http://ephesians-511.net/recent/docs/POPE_FRANCIS_FILES_AT_THIS_MINISTRYS_WEBSITE.doc
AMAZON SYNOD FILES AT THIS MINISTRY’S WEBSITE AS ON 1 JUNE 2021
(1350+)
http://ephesians-511.net/recent/docs/AMAZON_SYNOD_FILES_AT_THIS_MINISTRYS_WEBSITE.doc