ROME (AP) – Pope Francis on Monday urged governments to use the coronavirus crisis as a revolutionary opportunity to create a more economically and environmentally just world, where basic health is guaranteed for all.
Francis made an appeal in his annual foreign policy speech to ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, an appointment that was postponed two weeks after suffering a sciatic nerve pain attack that made it difficult to stop and walk.
Francis urged the governments represented at the Apostolic Palace to contribute to global initiatives to provide vaccines to the poor and to use the pandemic to restore what he said was a sick economic model that exploits the poor and the Earth.
“We need a kind of new Copernican revolution that can put the economy at the service of men and women, not vice versa,” he said, referring to the 16th-century paradigm shift that claimed the sun was at the heart of the the universe, not the Earth.
He said such a revolutionary new economy is “one that gives life and not death, that is inclusive and non-exclusive, human and non-dehumanizing, that cares for the environment and does not expel it.”
Francis has frequently called on the world to use the pandemic as an opportunity to re-imagine a global economy that values people and the planet above profits, and that brotherhood and solidarity guide human relations rather than conflict. and divisions.
Francis, 84, hit these issues right in his long speech, which was delivered in a larger-than-usual reception room to provide greater social distancing to the 88 ambassadors who attended. In the end, Francis invited them all, but said he would not shake their hand and urged them to keep their distance. Francis has been vaccinated against the virus.
In his speech, he called for basic health care to be provided to everyone. He noted that those who are on the fringes of society and working in the informal economy have been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, with fewer social media to survive.
“Driven by despair, many have sought other forms of income and risk being exploited through illegal or forced labor, prostitution and various criminal activities, including human trafficking,” Francis warned.
He said that children have suffered an “educational catastrophe” with schools closed, that women have been victims of domestic abuse, that the faithful have been deprived of community worship and that close human contact has been restricted to all of humanity. .
“Along with vaccines, fraternity and hope are, so to speak, the medicine we need in today’s world,” he said.
In addition to the pandemic, Francis listed other areas of special concern, starting with the coup in Myanmar, which visited Francis in 2017. He called for political leaders to be “quickly released as a sign of encouragement for a sincere dialogue aimed at the good of the country “.
He called for a definitive end to the war in Syria, noting that 2021 marks its tenth anniversary and urged the international community to “address the causes of the conflict with honesty and courage and seek solutions.” He praised the UN treaty banning nuclear weapons and the extension of the START treaty between the US and Russia.
He also called for disarmament efforts to extend to conventional and chemical weapons.