In a message to the participants in ‘Vax Live. A Concert to Reunite the World’, the Holy Pontiff noted that ‘the coronavirus has caused deaths and sufferings, affecting everyone’s life, especially that of the most vulnerable.’

In addition, the pandemic has contributed to worsen the existing social and environmental crisis, as you, young people, always remind us. And you do well by recalling it, the Pope pointed out.

In that regard, Pope Francis favored ‘a healing from the root, which will cure the cause of the evil and does not remain in the symptoms only’, and added that in those sick roots ‘we find the virus of individualism, which does not make us either freer or more equal, or more brothers, it rather makes us indifferent to the others’ suffering.’

After criticizing ‘closed nationalism’, the Pope added that the other variant of that virus ‘is when we put the laws of the market or intellectual property above the laws of love and health for humankind.’

Another one is when we believe in and develop a sick economy, which allows few very rich people, few very rich people, to have more than the rest of humankind, and the patterns of production and consumption destroy the planet, our ‘Common House’, Pope Francis stressed.

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