Vatican City, Oct 25, 2021 / 06:30 am (CNA).
Pope Francis on Monday appointed the economist Jeffrey Sachs to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
The Holy See press office said on Oct. 25 that the pope had named Sachs as an “ordinary member” of the academy founded in 1994 by Pope John Paul II to promote the study and progress of the social sciences.
Sachs, the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in New York, has been a frequent visitor to the Vatican in recent years.
The 66-year-old was a featured speaker in at least six Vatican conferences in 2019-2020, lecturing on topics from education to ethics.
The president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network also took part in the Amazon synod in October 2019 and “The Economy of Francesco” international virtual event in November 2020.
Sachs, who has served as an adviser to three United Nations secretaries-general, has advocated for a reduction in fertility rates in developing countries through the dissemination of contraception, a view at odds with Catholic teaching.
“Success at reducing high fertility rates depends on keeping girls in school, ensuring that children survive, and providing access to modern family planning and contraceptives,” he wrote in 2011.
CNA asked Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, about this statement in February 2020.
Sorondo responded that Sachs had made the comment in 2011. “Now he has changed,” the Argentine bishop said.
He explained that Sachs had featured with such frequency at Vatican conferences “because he integrates the magisterium of the Church and of Pope Francis into economics by putting the human person and the common good at the center.”
CNA asked Sachs in February 2020 how his advocacy for reducing fertility rates and contraception squared with Pope Francis’ sense of “integral human ecology,” and whether he believed it was right for people in the developed world to advocate lifestyle choices to those in the developing world.
Sachs replied that he strongly agreed with “Pope Francis’ support for ‘responsible parenthood’ as also enunciated by Pope St. Paul VI. This idea means that families, that is mothers and fathers together, should take a rational decision on having children based on their circumstances with focus of securing their flourishing.”
Sach is a special advisor to the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by U.N. member states in 2015 in a resolution called 2030 Agenda.
SDG target 5.6 is to “Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences.”
Sachs told CNA in 2020: “Access to abortion is a choice left to each nation. The Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 do not mention abortion or promote abortion.”
Sachs was born on Nov. 5, 1954, in Detroit, Michigan. He graduated in economics from Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard and was director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Time magazine has twice named him among the 100 most influential world leaders and the Economist magazine ranked him among the top three most influential living economists.
A specialist in monetary theory and international finance, Sachs is associated with the term “shock therapy,” used to describe his plans for post-communist Poland and Russia to move rapidly from a state-controlled to a free-market economy.
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who ran for president in 2016 and 2020, wrote the foreword to Sach’s 2017 book “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable.”
Sachs has criticized the Biden administration’s contention that China is engaged in genocide against the Uighur people in the country’s northwestern Xinjiang region.
In April, Sachs wrote: “There are credible charges of human rights abuses against Uighurs, but those do not per se constitute genocide.”
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It is truly disconcerting when the pope collaborates with a godless global Marxist like Jeffrey Sachs, let alone install him into the Pontifical Academy. It is another clear indication of Francis’ greater alliance with the world rather than Christ.
Right on, Peter. To my thinking – I may be in error – we can but pray in Union with the Martyr Pope and those who have understood that he did not so much flee before the wolves as send them running down their own perverted cliff top? The Divine Will can surely take the Sankt Gallen Mafia Judas Plan, all their lavender networks, and transform it to His purposes in good time… the suffering and religipus anguish the Catholic faithful have endured since that fateful conclave of 1958 will one day bear fruit? This Apostasy is surely The Bride of Christ’s way of the cross, as m
I have sometimes read… Let us keep the Faith and the Hope that both PPBXVI’s writings and Act of Sacrifice prevail over the huge pack of wolves he had finally unveiled were too many for one man. THE MARTYR POPE is Cardinal Sarah’s name for PPBXVI. The writing is on the Wall: the big bad wolf will lose.
Another cop out and furthering our own Police State!
No free speech anymore.
Sachs is just another minion in the Great Reset and and sadly a true Globalist!
Too bad now our Holy Church is a part of it!
Do the right thing and post ALL comments!
What next?
I can’t even get past the title.
He visits the Vatican so often that they mind as well give him an apartment. A more perfect exemplar of the sinister and soulless globalist is hard to imagine. To help CNA out a bit in its reporting, Sachs also supports abortion, not just contraception. Sachs really became (in)famous in the nineties for the “privatization” consulting work he did for the nations emerging from Communism or maybe just the former Party gangsters who became oligarchs after they stole everything they could grab as a result of his schemes. Such a man should not be let within fifty miles of the Vatican. Are there any cardinals or bishops who care enough about the Church, the faithful and the world to do something to try to stop this wicked agenda?
More evidence of the WEF/globalist agenda in play.