Vatican City, Mar 3, 2025 / 11:50 am (CNA).
Pope Francis addressed what he called a “planetary crisis” that is adversely affecting the world in multiple ways in a message Monday to the general assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
“The term ‘polycrisis’ evokes the dramatic nature of the historical juncture we are currently witnessing, in which wars, climate changes, energy problems, epidemics, the migratory phenomenon, and technological innovation converge,” the pope said in his message, dated Feb. 26 from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital.
“The intertwining of these critical issues, which currently touch on various dimensions of life, lead us to ask ourselves about the destiny of the world and our understanding of it,” the pope said.
The Vatican academy is holding a meeting of scientists, theologians, and historians March 3-4 at the Augustinianum Conference Center near the Vatican on the theme “The End of the World? Crises, Responsibilities, Hopes.”
Academics from across the scientific and theological fields, including Nobel laureates, planetologists, physicists, biologists, paleoanthropologists, theologians, and historians, are attending the Pontifical Academy for Life’s plenary meeting this week.
In a presentation of the conference to journalists March 3, academy president Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia explained that “we felt the urgency to save the common human.”
“The frontier before us is a planetary frontier,” it affects all people, he said. With the meeting, the archbishop added, they desire “to design a future of hope for all without leaving anyone behind.”
“It’s obvious we cannot be indifferent,” Paglia said.
Pope Francis in his message said the first step in the face of the world’s “polycrisis” is to examine “with greater attention our representation of the world and the cosmos.”
“If we do not do this, and we do not seriously analyze our profound resistance to change, both as people and as a society, we will continue to do what we have always done with other crises,” he said, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which he said was “squandered” as an opportunity to transform consciences and social practices.
The pope also warned against “endorsing utilitarian deregulation and global neoliberalism means imposing the law of the strongest as the only rule; and it is a law that dehumanizes.”
Francis also lamented the “progressive irrelevance of international bodies, which are also undermined by shortsighted attitudes, concerned with protecting particular and national interests.”
He said people of goodwill must continue to be committed to more effective world organizations so that “a multilateralism is promoted that does not depend on changing political circumstances or the interests of the few.”
The pope said hope is of fundamental importance. “It does not consist of waiting with resignation but of striving with zeal toward true life, which leads well beyond the narrow individual perimeter,” he said.
Hope, Francis said, quoting Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Spe Salvi, “is linked to a lived union with a ‘people,’ and for each individual it can only be attained within this ‘we.’”
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What a great time to hold the “planetary crisis” accountable to the perennial moral absolutes in Veritatis Splendor (St. John Paul II), rather than to only some more accommodating and less grounded “calculus of consequences” (another term from Benedict XVI).
Of course, this timely accountability was the centerpiece of the much-maligned Second Vatican Council (in continuity with the “suspended” Vatican I) in the Church’s encounter with the modern world–its “joys and hopes, and fears and anxieties,” both).
If only the Freemason Bugnini tribe hadn’t driven so many Catholics away with their unaccountable pandemic of liturgical experimentation.
The crisis theme “The End of the World? Crises, Responsibilities, Hopes.” are all natural and political. Nary a word on the spiritual crisis of doctrinal mitigation and monumental loss of faith.
While Catholics are growing in number by births we’re decreasing rapidly, especially the West in terms of belief and practice. Besides, many who do believe as such find justification for moral license in recent Church documents,and ‘quips’ as a commentary contributor put it. Where have all the Apostles gone? Gone to lament every one.
Almost as if the message warns, Quick, into the lifeboats. Christ is on the way for the final judgment.
Francis’ concerns are of the world.
Today he reportedly needed not one but two bronchoscopies to clear his bronchial tubes of accumulated mucous and other gunk.
Francis’ message to the Pontifical Academy of Life does not (perhaps Francis could not) mention that God once breathed into man’s nostrils, giving him life. May Francis catch the breath of God so that he may live. The world is not our final resting place. The planetary cosmos is not our home. With God there is no crisis of life.
I’m guessing that with every world crisis since the creation of the world and the rise of human beings as rulers of earth, this same warning arises from someone. What we’re seeing are the rotten fruits of man’s sin. If God tarries (an old evangelical Protestant expression!), the people He created will still be on Planet Earth and suffering will always be with them, but The End will be brought about by GOD, not man.
In every so-called “crisis” is exploitable panic and fear that can be used to impose political solutions of various power grabs and raids on the public purse by the powers that be for their own self-enrichment and empowerment.
Conversion is an ongoing and a never-ending opportunity.