Pope worried about politics focused on interests of the few

In a message addressed to the Pontifical Academy for Life on March 3, 2025, Pope Francis expressed concern about the loss of momentum of multilateralism, which is being undermined “by short-sighted attitudes concerned with protecting particular and national interests.” The Pope, who has been hospitalized since February 14, officially signed his text on February 26 from the Gemelli Hospital in Rome.

Having been treated for 19 days by doctors at Gemelli due to a serious respiratory infection, the Pope continues to approve appointments and sign texts. This is evidenced by his message sent to the participants of the general assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life gathered in Rome for three days to reflect on the theme of “The end of the world? Crises, responsibilities, hopes.”

In this one-and-a-half-page text, the Pope laments the “progressive irrelevance of international bodies.”

This is a recurring theme in some of the major texts of his pontificate and in his speeches to ambassadors. The head of the Catholic Church laments the “short-sighted attitudes concerned with protecting particular and national interests” and calls for a multilateralism that does not “depend on changing political circumstances or the interests of the few.”

In his view, international organizations must be given “power to provide for the global common good, the elimination of hunger and poverty, and the sure defence of fundamental human rights.”

This is an “urgent task which regards the whole of humanity,” he says.

At a press conference, I.MEDIA asked Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, about the coincidence of the Pope's message and recent geopolitical tensions. For example, a breakdown in relations in recent days between the US and Ukraine has caused great international concern, especially in Europe. The US had been providing vital aid to Ukraine in the conflict, begun when Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago.

Archbishop Paglia replied that the text had been written before the hospitalization, and could not be directly linked to the events of the past few days.

For Archbishop Paglia, who made no comment on specific events in international news, the Pope's message points to the “forgetfulness of the people,” a phenomenon that is not new.

According to the Italian archbishop, the pontiff wanted to warn against the risk of politics being in the hands of “the richest and most powerful” and “forgetting the common good of the entire planet.”

In his message, Pope Francis returns to the mirage of technology. “It will not be technology that saves us (cf. Encyclical Letter Laudato si’, 101): endorsing utilitarian deregulation and global neoliberalism means imposing the law of the strongest as the only rule; and it is a law that dehumanizes,” he writes.

In Laudato si’, a major text on ecology published in 2015, the Pope emphasized that technological progress had “not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values, and conscience,” and that this needed to be remedied.

In his message to the Academy for Life, the Pope addresses from the very first lines the concept of a “polycrisis” which covers ongoing wars, climate change, energy problems, epidemics, migratory phenomena, and technological innovation.

“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,” he writes to the members of the institute, founded by Pope John Paul II.

To this end, the Argentine Pope invites the academicians “to avoid remaining immobile, anchored in our certainties, habits and fears” and “to listen carefully to the contribution of areas of scientific knowledge.”

The Holy Father emphasizes that to emerge from this “polycrisis” we need to overcome our "profound resistance to change” and pay “greater attention to our representation of the world and the cosmos.” We need to “listen” to scientific knowledge and “realize that our parameters regarding anthropology and culture require profound revision.” In particular he highlights new “ways of interpreting the world and its evolution, with the unprecedented forms of relatedness that correspond to it.”

These perspectives that reveal the interconnectedness of humanity, not just among ourselves but with the “entire system of living things,” can “provide us with signs of hope.”

And this hope “does not consist of waiting with resignation, but of striving with zeal towards true life, which leads well beyond the narrow individual perimeter.” Francis quotes Pope Benedict, who reminds us that each individual can only attain hope as part of a people, a “we.”