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As reported by The Wall Street Journal on 13 January, Pope Francis, on 10 January, gave his annual address to the assembled ambassadors of the Vatican’s diplomatic corps; the Vatican maintains diplomatic relations with the E.U. and with 183 sovereign nations.
In keeping with the mainstream narrative, Pope Francis called for greater diplomatic efforts to address areas of concern including climate change, immigration issues and, of course, COVID-19.
He spoke in favor of what he called fundamental values, including “the right to life, from conception to its natural end, and the right to religious freedom.” He railed against “ideological colonization,” his term for the way rich nations promote “progressive” concepts like contraception, same-sex marriage and gender mutability in developing nations.
He repeated his earlier calls for greater access to vaccines and drugs as part of a coordinated global effort to fight COVID-19 (with zero mention of any natural healing strategies). Among the things he lamented were COVID-related school closures, which were driving children into virtual reality realms that isolated them from normal human interactions. And he lamented the politicization of the vaccine debate.
TRENDPOST: The Pope called on individuals who had not yet done so to get vaccinated, not just for themselves but out of respect for the health of those around them, saying that the unvaccinated were allowing themselves to be “influenced by the ideology of the moment, often bolstered by baseless information or poorly documented facts.”
He railed against “cancel culture” while using cancel culture’s rhetoric to vilify and shame anyone who dared challenge or resist the vaccine narrative.
So the Pope’s respect for religious freedom, and his condemnation of cancel culture, doesn’t extend to the right to refuse to be vaccinated.
He said just as much when he not only gave the vaccine his blessing, but said that “morally everyone must take the vaccine”; see “HEALTH CARE WORKERS CHALLENGE VAX ON RELIGIOUS GROUNDS, POPE INDICATES THEY DON’T HAVE A PRAYER” (12 Oct 2021). See also “CATHOLICS PUSH BACK ON VACCINE ‘PAGEANT'” (26 Jan 2021).
One could probably make the case that the very notion of the Vatican’s diplomatic corps maintaining relations with 183 “sovereign nations” smacks of hypocrisy as well.
One of the factors that defines a “sovereign nation” is its ability to preserve the integrity of its borders, and yet it was Pope Francis who, in 2019, remarked on Pres. Trump’s plan for a border wall, “I don’t know what’s happening with this new culture of defending territories by building walls.
We already knew one, that (one) in Berlin, which brought so many headaches and so much suffering,” he said.