In the effort to stop climate change, human trafficking, and nuclear threats, Pope Francis said that nation states should give way to globalization in some aspects, calling on them to create “intergovernmental institutions that manage their common interests.”
“In the current situation of globalization not only of the economy but also of technological and cultural exchanges, the nation-state is no longer able to procure the common good of its population alone,” Pope Francis told the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, according to Catholic News Agency.
The Pope did emphasize the need for subsidiarity that would allow nations to maintain their sovereignty but ultimately conceded that intergovernmental institutions would have to fill the global gaps. “While, according to the principle of subsidiarity, individual nations must be given the power to operate as far as they can, on the other hand, groups of neighboring nations — as is already the case — can strengthen their cooperation by attributing the exercise of certain functions and services to intergovernmental institutions that manage their common interests,” he said.
Issues like climate change and human trafficking are just two examples that Pope Francis cited that call for a “supranational common good.” Pope Francis also touched on the issue of nationalism, which he says has sparked a rise in distrust toward migrants and a neglect of the “common good.”
“The Church observes with concern the re-emergence, almost everywhere in the world, of aggressive currents towards foreigners, especially immigrants, as well as that growing nationalism that neglects the common good,” Pope Francis told the professors gathered to hear him speak.
The Roman Pontiff called on nations to welcome all immigrants and to regulate migratory flows with “virtue of prudence.”
“It is the task of public authority to protect migrants and to regulate migratory flows with the virtue of prudence, as well as to promote reception so that local populations are trained and encouraged to consciously participate in the integrating process of migrants who are welcomed,” he said. “The way in which a nation welcomes migrants reveals its vision of human dignity and its relationship with humanity. Every human person is a member of humanity and has the same dignity.”
Earlier this week, 51 Catholic theologians and priests issued an open letter to bishops calling on them to admonish Pope Francis for speaking heresy and appointing people in powerful positions who openly flaunt Church teaching.
“We take this measure as a last resort to respond to the accumulating harm caused by Pope Francis’s words and actions over several years, which have given rise to one of the worst crises in the history of the Catholic Church,” the group said in a 20-page open letter this week that was published at LifeSiteNews.
In an 11-page letter released last year, Archbishop Viganò, former Nuncio from the Vatican to Washington, D.C., alleged that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had been sanctioned under Pope Benedict XVI only to have those sanctions removed by Pope Francis upon his ascendancy in 2013. Cardinal McCarrick had an alleged history of sexually abusing male seminarians and, according to Viganò, was ordered by Pope Benedict to refrain from saying Mass or public ministry.
Pope Francis has still not responded to the accusations laid against him by Viganò.