“This is not an abstract idea”, says member of Vatican COVID Commission Alessio Pecorario: “War is something real and our responsibility is to limit it”
At the Angelus today, Pope Francis repeated his plea for a “global and immediate” ceasefire, at the same time that he expressed his particular concern over the skirmishes in the Caucasus region between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in which at least 16 people have been killed in clashes over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Caritas Internationalis is calling on the movers and shakers of the world to listen to Pope Francis’s appeal for a global ceasefire at a time in which the suffering of millions has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
At a press conference today on “Preparing the future, building peace in the time of COVID-19”, Vatican officials proposed as a way of guaranteeing the coronavirus economic and social recovery that the world leave aside an arms race and reduce military spending to instead “‘race’ towards food, health and work security”.
In his greeting today after the Angelus prayer, Pope Francis praised as “commendable” a UN Security Council resolution adopted this week calling for a “global and immediate” ceasefire amid the coronavirus pandemic, and urged the international community to “effectively and promptly” implement that cessation of hostilities “for the good of the many people who are suffering”.
A Vatican official has urged the world “to press the reset button” on the system post-COVID and to forge “a new path”.
“The way we treat women’s bodies reveals our level of humanity”, Pope Francis has pleaded today on End Sexual Violence in Conflict Day.
In an online address to the 73rd World Health Assembly, Archbishop Ivan Jurkovič, the Permanent Representative of the Holy See to the UN in Geneva, has reiterated the Vatican’s “strong support” for a COVID-19 global ceasefire and the easing of international sanctions amid the pandemic.