The bishops issued an Appeal for the Church and the World in multiple languages, signed also by cardinals and archbishops in Germany and elsewhere. The document is highly critical of government efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing, quarantine of infected individuals, testing and contact tracing, comparing these measures to “dictatorships”.
The appeal was evidently drafted by the nemesis of Pope Francis — the Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and has been endorsed by many leaders in the Catholic Church who vehemently oppose the Pope’s more liberal course.
Throughout the appeal is a warning that the global effort to deal with COVID-19 is leading to a dangerous “odious technological tyranny” in a “world government beyond all control”.
We have reason to believe, on the basis of official data on the incidence of the epidemic as related to the number of deaths, that there are powers interested in creating panic among the world’s population with the sole aim of permanently imposing unacceptable forms of restriction on freedoms, of controlling people and of tracking their movements. The imposition of these illiberal measures is a disturbing prelude to the realization of a world government beyond all control.
Of course, the idea of a “world government” has anti-Semitic connotations which flare up from time to time among Catholic clerics, although the “odious technological tyranny” is probably a reference to Bill Gates — the boogeyman of coronavirus conspiracy theories.
The most disgusting section of the appeal is the warning against vaccines — the bishops imply the COVID-19 vaccines (which don’t even exist yet) are made from aborted fetuses:
We ask the scientific community to be vigilant, so that cures for Covid-19 are offered in honesty for the common good. Every effort must be made to ensure that shady business interests do not influence the choices made by government leaders and international bodies. It is unreasonable to penalize those remedies that have proved to be effective, and are often inexpensive, just because one wishes to give priority to treatments or vaccines that are not as good, but which guarantee pharmaceutical companies far greater profits, and exacerbate public health expenditures. Let us also remember, as Pastors, that for Catholics it is morally unacceptable to develop or use vaccines derived from material from aborted fetuses.
No doubt the bishops were elated that the appeal was co-signed by the notorious anti-vaxxer and Kennedy family black sheep Robert Francis Kennedy Jr.
