The Pontifical Academy for Life released a paper on the eff-ects of the pandemic. Titled Hu-mana Communitas in the age of pandemic: untimely meditations on life’s rebirth, it starts from the realisation that human “fragility” has been made worse by the pandemic.

The document notes that “all of us may succumb to the wounds of disease, the killing of wars, the overwhelming threats of disasters.” However, there are “very specific ethical and poli-tical responsibilities toward the vulnerability of individuals who are at greater risk for their health, their life, their dignity.”

For the Academy, this calls for a “conversion” towards a sense of responsibility and inter-national solidarity, regardless of borders and political systems. specifically, “COVID-19 is the most recent manifestation of globalization,” and sparing no one, it “has made us all equally vulnerable, all equally exposed. Such a realization has come at a high cost.”

The “lesson of fragility” touches everyone, especially hospital patients, prison inmates, and refugees. “COVID-19 is not just the result of natural occu-rrences. What happens in nature is already the result of a complex intermediation with the human world of economical choices and models of development.”

The pandemic “is the result, more than the cause, of financial greed, the self-indulgence of life styles defined by consumption indulgence and excess.”