ROSARIO, Argentina – According to a member of Pope Francis’s commission for a post-COVID-19 world, there’s a need for a radical response to a “radical crisis.”
“The COVID-19 emergency is pushing the world to a different scenario,” said Argentine Father Augusto Zampini, adjunct Secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and member of the Vatican’s COVID-19 commission. “This will change necessarily, as Pope Francis has said, we will emerge different, and we have to decide if better or worse.”
“Because the Church is in the world, we are not foreign to this challenge,” he said. “The Church needs to respond to this crisis in a radical way because it’s a radical crisis.”
Zampini noted that the immediacy of the emergency, solutions must be thought out for the long term.
“COVID-19 is also pushing the Church into refining its mission,” he said.
“This is something that we have to respond to urgently. It’s very complex, but it requires simplicity in its solution. The Church that is always trying to respond to reality following the tradition of the Church: How are we going to respond to this tiny virus that is making all the major viruses we have all the more visible?”
He then listed several things as “major viruses,” from the need to care for “our common home,” poverty, inequality, and so on.
Zampini said he believes that the COVID-19 crisis will speed up some of the reforms that Pope Francis is proposing for the world: “What does it mean to love our neighbors and enemies? What does it mean to create a culture of encounter and peace?”
“We cannot be the same institution in a different world,” he said. “We need to be able to say something new, because the word of God is always new.”
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With thanks to Crux news site and Inés San Martín.
