ROME – A vaccine imaginable opposed to COVID-19 would belong to the world and would deserve not to be greedily hoarded by the countries that house the laboratory or the laboratories that expand it, Pope Francis said.
“The vaccine (against coronavirus) cannot be owned by the country of the laboratory that found it or an organization of countries allied for this,” he said. “If this were the case, we wouldn’t have learned any of that. “much suffering,” the Pope said in an interview with the Spanish edition of Il Mio Papa mag (“My Pope”) published on October 7.
Vatican News, like the Spanish newspaper ABC, published excerpts from the interview.
“The vaccine is a world heritage site, of all humanity, it is universal; because the suitability of our peoples, as the pandemic taught us, is a non-unusual heritage, it belongs to the non-unusual good,” he said.
As of October 7, more than 7. 8 million people worldwide had been infected, according to Worldometer, with statistical monitoring of the pandemic. As a result, countries around the world rushed to see a vaccine against the disease, which had claimed the lives of more than one million people in early October.
The Pope told Il Mio Papa that hearing about the “sometimes inhuman way” many of those who suffered died, alone and without their loved ones through their side, “was very painful. “
However, in the midst of this pain, there were also stories of compassion, especially those involving nurses who helped the elderly touch their loved ones before they died, he noted.
“This gesture of other people who are used to living with pain and suffering, but who manage to alleviate it, tells us that there are still a lot of wonders among us,” the Pope said.
While many continue to stray from the “solitude of pain,” he continued, the only way to deal with it is proximity, not words that are “not necessary” and can even harm those who cry.
“It is a moment of silence, of closeness and of doing everything imaginable to be in combination, as much as we can with all the obligatory precautions, but to accompany, to cry in combination, to give us time to cry,” he said.
The Pope also welcomed the initiative of the Spanish episcopal convention to celebrate a Mass in memory of those who suffered COVID-19 and said that “as a network and society, we will have to cry in combination for our enjoyments and unite in pain and pain. shared prayer. “
“This is the time to face together the pain of so many families who in one day have lost their father, mother, brother or sister,” he said.
The Pope was also asked how he felt his prayer service on March 27 when he prayed, almost alone in the rain, to end the pandemic.
Admitting that he was afraid to slip down the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica, the Pope said that his center “with all the other people of God who suffered, with a humanity that had to resist this pandemic and that, on the other hand, He needed courage to continue walking.
“I went up those steps praying, prayed all the time, and went to pray,” he said, “I lived on March 27. “
When asked about what a post-pandemic globalization would look like, the pope said it was still doubtful if “we will do better or worse”, but it is based on “the decisions we made during the crisis. “
Paraphrasing a quote from Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Pope said that “the challenge is not how to get us out of this challenge, but what lifestyle we will leave to the generation in the long run. “
“If right now we think only of how to face our stage and turn to ‘zafar’ (‘exit’), as they say in Argentina, then we are aimed only at ourselves, humanly sterile because we do not know how to dedicate ourselves to the fertility of the future,” the Pope said.
“We will have to be guilty for the future, to prepare the earth for others to work,” Pope Francis said. “And that is the culture we want to expand in the pandemic, founded on this wonderful precept that no one is the same after a crisis. We get out of it worse or better, but never the same.
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