The Vatican has thrown its weight behind a controversial United Nations declaration that seeks to turbocharge globalism while eroding national sovereignty by accelerating the drive towards Pope Francis’s vision of “global governance.”

Couched in alarmist rhetoric warning of “rising catastrophic and existential risks” the ambitiously titled document “Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact, and Declaration on Future Generations” is designed to give the UN sweeping powers in “transforming global governance.”

The 193-member United Nations General Assembly adopted the pact on Sunday, pledging “a new beginning in multilateralism,” with Argentina’s newly elected president, Javier Milei, slamming the pact as the instrument of a “multi-tentacled leviathan” which seeks to impose a socialist agenda on the world.

Russia and Iran are among the eight nations to oppose the treaty, which is the brainchild of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and charts a globalist roadmap promoting climate action, gender equality, and regulation of artificial intelligence.

Cardinal’s Feeble Opposition to Abortion

Speaking on Monday at the UN headquarters in New York, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, a leading contender to become the next pope, hailed the pact as “a source and a reason for hope” lamenting that “the sense of belonging to a single human family is fading.”

Parolin, who is second in command of the Vatican City State after the pope, said the Vatican wished to “express its reservations” about concepts like “sexual and reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” used in the pact to describe abortion.

The cardinal noted that “the Holy See considers these terms as applying to a holistic concept of health, which embrace, each in their own way, the person in the entirety of his or her personality, mind, and body.

“The Holy See does not consider abortion or access to abortion or abortifacients as a dimension of these terms,” Parolin said. “With reference to ‘gender,’ the Holy See understands the term to be grounded in the biological sexual identity that is male or female.”

While not using the word “marriage,” the cardinal spoke of “the achievement of personal maturity in sexuality and in the mutual love and decision-making that characterize the conjugal relationship between a man and a woman in accordance with moral norms.”

The pact calls for “universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights” and the need to “accelerate efforts” to ensure that “all young people enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, including immunizations and vaccinations and sexual and reproductive health.”

The diplomat, who is chiefly responsible for the failed Vatican-China accord — a secret document that Parolin hopes will be renewed for a third time when it expires later this year — also called for “the total elimination of nuclear weapons” and for a “regulatory framework for AI ethics.”

Pope Francis’s Vision of “Global Governance”

While calling for “the equality and sovereign dignity of all nations,” Parolin repeatedly quoted Pope Francis, stressing the pontiff’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, which mentions the words “global” and “globalism” 43 times and calls for the development of “global governance” and the establishment of a “global juridical, political, and economic order.”

Calling for the worldwide elimination of the death penalty in contradiction to the teaching of the Bible, the Church Fathers, and 2000 years of Catholic magisterial teaching, Fratelli Tutti dismisses any theology of “divine retribution” in response to the global disasters engulfing humanity.

In May 2022, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Holy See’s Secretary for Relations with States and International Organisations, repeatedly stressed Pope Francis’s vision of “global governance” in a lecture titled “The Culture of Encounter and Global Governance.”

In August, Francis, a strong advocate for open borders, called for “promoting in every way a global governance of migration based on justice, fraternity, and solidarity.”

Meanwhile, the elitist, pro-globalist, Davos-based World Economic Forum reissued an article hailing the “Pact for the Future” as a “landmark” declaration consisting of 56 actions designed to “turbocharge” the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, “but in particular to speed progress on issues around peace and security, global governance, climate change, digital cooperation, human rights, gender, youth, and future generations.”

Speaking at the WEF in January, Guterres called for a “new, multipolar global order” and “effective mechanisms of global governance” including “deep reforms to global governance to manage geopolitical tensions.”

Conservatives Caution Against “Hubristic” Treaty

Conservative voices, however, are cautioning against what they see as a dystopian attempt at a global power grab.

Argentinian President Javier Milei, an outspoken critic of the pontiff from Buenos Aires, blasted the UN pact as the “supranational governance model of international bureaucrats who seek to impose a certain way of life on the citizens of the world.”

“Argentina will not back any policy that implies the restriction of individual freedoms or trade, nor the violation of the natural rights of individuals,” Milei said. The libertarian economist has previously accused the pope of showing “great affinity with dictators like Castro and Maduro” and being “on the side of bloody dictatorships.”

The pact “will join a long list of U.N. declarations that have served as diplomatic and rhetorical cudgels with which to attack the United States,” warned the Heritage Foundation, calling the declaration “hubristic” and “unrealistic” as it “merely divert(s)” the UN and “further erode(s) its reputation.”

“The pact is an unwise effort to bestow additional responsibilities on an organization that is unable to manage its current remit,” researcher and author Brett Schaefer wrote in a Heritage Foundation piece titled “The U.S. Must Oppose the U.N. Pact for the Future.”

The “most egregious problem” with the pact, Schaefer observed, is its failure to grapple with the fact that the UN has not fulfilled the purposes in its own Charter, like “maintaining international peace and security, respecting self-determination, coordinating governments to work toward common ends, and promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms — for the simple reason that most member states themselves oppose them.”

Schaefer also pointed out how Guterres “has been traversing the globe to issue dire warnings of the threat” of climate change, “claiming that by failing to act, ‘humanity has opened the gates to hell’ and unleashed extreme weather events,” even though “these hyperbolic declarations are not supported by the UN’s own reports” and “follow in a long line of proclamations of climate catastrophe that have failed to materialize.”

Tim Hincliffe, editor of The Sociable, warned that the pact is “paving the way for a digital gulag where everyone is connected to the internet and assigned a digital ID, while those who question UN narratives are to be crushed for spewing hate speech and disinformation.”

Pope Francis’s repeated appeals for a “global governance,” which many popular Catholic commentators have interpreted as a call for a “one-world government,” especially following the hysteria of the COVID-19 pandemic, have also been picked up by academics.

Writing in a special 2024 issue of the Journal of Moral Theology, Catholic theologian and ethicist Kevin Ahern argues that the “Catholic Church has proven to be a vocal supporter of more robust forms of global governance” despite Christian “populists” and “nationalists” who “oppose efforts that might limit the power and privileges of their own countries.”

Ahern sees the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s vision of “global governance” as a forerunner of Francis’s “more pastoral” plea for a new world order, despite criticisms from political theorist Emily Butler Finley’s warning that such utopianism underestimates sin and marks Catholicism’s turn “away from beliefs previously deemed central to the faith.”

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.