Pope Leo Calls Health A ‘Universal Right’

Pope Leo’s understated public manner obscures his acceleration of the Vatican’s leftward tilt. The trajectory, set by Pope Francis, quickens under Leo. Following his predecessor, Leo locates evil — in this instance, health inequalities — in impersonal, political terms. Specifically, in the institutions of a free economy.

The ideological thrust of his private address to the Pontifical Academy for Life on Feb. 16 drew little attention. Delivered in the Vatican’s private reception hall, the talk urged academy members to recognize a global “connection between the health of all and that of each individual” and to repel “the structural causes and policies that determine inequalities.”

it has never been more important to dedicate time, people, and expertise to safeguarding life and health. In regard to the latter, Pope Francis affirmed that it is not a consumer good, but a universal right which means that access to health care services cannot be a privilege.

The word “privilege” was Francis’ jab at free market economics, which he accused of sustaining “the invisible tyranny of money that only guarantees the privileges of a few.” Leo repeats it with intent. He called for “sustainable healthcare systems capable of satisfying every health need in a world of limited resources.”

Academy members were well familiar with Leo’s citation from Francis’s 2016 address to Doctors with Africa (CUAMM). They were alert to its distinction between health itself and healthcare. Leo was replicating Francis’ designation of health — res ipsa — as a comprehensive entitlement indivisible from the lengthening fabric of human rights. He enjoined Catholics to “find effective means of strengthening international and multinational relationships” in order to eradicate inequalities in health worldwide.

Leo follows his predecessor in specifying inequality as the root of social ills. The Argentine pope’s documented comfort with dictatorial Latin American regimes prompted Yale scholar and Cuban exile Carlos Eire to write of Francis’ “preferential option for oppressors.” That sympathy is materializing on Leo’s watch as an emerging component of the Catholic Church’s social doctrine.

Marxist Code

To casual ears, Leo’s address sounds simply like a conventional appeal to the common good, a basic principle of Catholic social teaching. But it is not. Leo’s insistence on what public health sages term “health equity” is code for the Marxist ideal of a classless society. The passé jargon of class struggle resurrects in the language of public policy striving for equal outcomes in health for all peoples everywhere.

The concept of health as a human right — distinct from access to medical treatment or the obligations of charity — exists nowhere in traditional Catholic moral reasoning. Rather, it was the brainchild of post-wartime visionaries. The preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO), drafted in 1946 and enacted in 1948, declares that “enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.”

Adjudicating Rights

What, precisely, is health? WHO’s open-ended definition interprets it as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

How is this grand standard determined? And by whom? How will it be adjudicated among the elderly, the infirm, the terminally ill, the cognitively impaired, or mentally unstable? Does it apply to the unborn? If a child is delivered with spina bifida, has a right been violated? Should a woman’s right to “reproductive health” supersede any rights of a gestating infant?

Will medical schools in Fiji and Malawi mandate the same curricula on transgender care and LBGT health as the Mayo Clinic?

Imagine the UN Commission on Human Rights monitoring dietary habits, blood sugar levels, lifestyles, and kidney function on every continent. Think what measures the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on the Future of Health and Healthcare might recommend in order to unify corporeal outcomes in a world marked with dissimilar cultures and the absence of a shared morality.

Leo short-circuited queries with managerial cant: “Health is influenced and promoted by a combination of factors, which need to be examined and confronted in their complexity.” It requires “dialogue between different fields of knowledge: medicine, politics, ethics, management, and others.”

His prescription is inexhaustible, limited only by the ingenuity of countless world improvers from activist billionaires to nonprofit entrepreneurs. Tally in self-selected spokesmen for human flourishing. These include investors in healthcare consortiums plus multinational pharmaceutical firms with financial stakes in vaccine, therapeutics, and medical infrastructure. Add the high-altitude crowd safe in Davos from the consequences of their beliefs and practices. The list goes on.

In essence, the pope enjoined academy members to guarantee a cornucopia of intangibles under the banner of universal health. He delivered a green light to disciples of an inherently biological understanding of the common good. We met some of them during the Covid lockdowns.

Health is an ineffable, hence boundless, stimulus for entrusting every detail of individual lives to the moral imagination — and tyrannical impulses — of bureaucratic overlords. Functionaries will parcel out compassion according to politics brokered by the asset-collecting, wealth-distributing state.

Globally Mandated One Health

Turning to the theme of prevention, Leo floated the term “One health” (his italics). A suggestive coinage, it signals a totalizing system of globally mandated strategies to politicize all of life:

The concept of One health can help us as a basis for a global, multidisciplinary and integrated approach to health issues. It emphasizes the environmental dimension and the interdependence of the various forms of life and ecological factors that enable their balanced development. . . .

Understood in terms of public action, One health calls for the integration of health considerations into all policies (transportation, housing, agriculture, employment, education, and so on), since questions of health touch upon every aspect of life. Thus, we need to strengthen our understanding and promotion of the common good

A monstrous abstraction, One health subjects all aspects of living to state control. It requires state oversight of all medical records. Individual privacy is precluded. It is a raw collectivist solution to what Leo deems “the structural causes and policies that determine inequalities.”

Structural Sin

Belief in the supremacy of impersonal, structural sin — over individual sin — is the key concept of liberation theology. It was injected into Catholic social teaching by the Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellín, Columbia, in 1968. By locating evil in so-called structures of sin (free enterprise, personal property, etc.) it diminishes, even displaces, emphasis on personal wrongdoing. This denatures Christian understanding of the nature of salvation. Morality couched in the language of ideology and public policy grants primacy to the state and its bedfellows as dominant agents of liberation from the consequences of sin.

Under cover of common-good discourse, Leo proposes redemption in the fundamental reordering of society. But without a common understanding of the meaning of man and of human life, allusion to the common good is a tool for relativist agendas.

It is worth noting here that Canadian doctors recently opined that euthanasia “may be an appropriate treatment” for newborns with disabilities. Remember the era of China’s one-child policy. Between 1979 and 2015, local health authorities tracked women’s menstrual cycles, justifying abortion on grounds of the common good. Disparate notions of the common good lead to contrasting interpretations of the meaning of treatment.

A flexible incantation, common good leaves room to relieve society from the encumbrance of “life unworthy of life.” In The Person and the Common Good (1946), Jacques Maritain wrote:

Only yesterday, across the Rhine, we saw to what atrocities a purely biological conception of human society can lead. The destruction of human lives, which were believed to become a burden on the community, was not only tolerated but even extolled.

Lastly, Leo’s speech hid the redistribution of wealth that is One health’s ultimate objective. Healthcare systems which are free to users at the point of entry are not free to providers. Healthcare is a labor-intensive industry. Drugs and materiel cost. So does infrastructure, R&D, manufacturing, and related supply chains. All providers, from physicians and technicians to clerical staff and hospital cleaning crews have to be paid.

Who pays? One health suggests a pipeline from productive nations to unproductive, misgoverned, or maladaptive ones. Following Francis, Leo considers no alternative causes for health inequalities beyond Marxist hostility to the economic and cultural prerequisites for a prosperous society.

Traditional emphasis on the natural limits of man shield Christian social thought against utopian proposals for perfect social justice. But liberation theology jumped the guardrails. In a 1968 speech in Havana, Fidel Castro observed in wonderment that “the theologians are becoming communists and the communists are becoming theologians.” He dubbed this one of “the paradoxes of history.”

Today’s Vatican appears all too willing to oblige.

Maureen Mullarkey is a painter and a critic. A member of the International Association of Art Critics, she writes on art and its intersection with religion and politics. Her essays have appeared in The Nation, The Hudson Review, Arts Magazine, Art & Antiques, The Weekly Standard, and The American Arts Quarterly. She was a columnist for The New York Sun during its life as a print publication. Currently, she is a senior contributor to The Federalist and keeper of the weblog Studio Matters. She is represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC. Follow her on Twitter, @mmletters.