Pope Francis has appointed development economist Jeffrey Sachs to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Sachs is a professor at Columbia University who became almost synonymous with the “shock therapy” approach to privatization in the Soviet Union. He’s criticized the Biden administration for supposedly overstating Chinese abuse of Uyghur Muslims. He’s also infamously in favor of population control — having championed initiatives to “greatly reduce fertility rates in poor countries.” Needless to say, this is an unusual appointment for a Catholic Church that still believes that abortion and artificial contraception are sinful.
According to a report on this appointment by Edward Pentin at the National Catholic Register, the chancellor of the Academy, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, explained Sachs’s unusually close relationship with the Vatican in recent years, by saying: “He integrates the magisterium of the Church and of Pope Francis into economics by putting the human person and the common good at the center.”
Anyway, if you thought that at least the Vatican itself could use its own institutional power for promoting Catholicism, rather than the same old global power-elite nonsense, you were mistaken.