One of the most serious emergencies today is that the world forgets about and does not attend to the common good and the needs of regular people, especially poor people, the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life said.

“It is an emergency that risks being tragic because the common good cannot be decided or managed by just a few people,” especially, as it is now perhaps, by “the richest and the most powerful,” Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia said at a news conference at the Vatican March 3.

Politics and many other institutions are at risk when they are “in the hands of a few and forgetting the common good of the entire planet,” he said.

Pope Francis, instead, from the very start of his pontificate, has been advocating that truth can be found in the “inner depth of the people,” the archbishop said. The entirety of a people and community, but especially the poor “have a light that needs to be revealed in order to counter the power of the few.”

The archbishop’s comments came during his presentation of the academy’s 30th general assembly being held in Rome March 3-5. Pope Francis sent a written message to participants, dated Feb. 26 from Gemelli Hospital, noting the multiple crises facing humanity “in which wars, climate change, energy problems, epidemics, the migratory phenomenon and technological innovation converge.”

The multidisciplinary and global nature of these “critical issues, which currently touch on various dimensions of life, lead us to ask ourselves about the destiny of the world and our understanding of it,” he wrote, lamenting the “progressive irrelevance of international bodies, which are also undermined by short-sighted attitudes, concerned with protecting particular and national interests.”

Paglia said the weakening of international agencies and institutions is just one sign of the current trend to forget about or ignore the people. This leads to “solutions” that hardly take into account the common good of everyone, particularly the poorest countries.

It is “the absolute primacy of the ego, the dictatorship of the self and the ego, which weakens everything else,” he said. The situation worsens when these super-egos become wedded to money, which “becomes the new idol” that has many “foolish servants.” This is why the Pontifical Academy for Life is made up of experts from and dedicated to multiple disciplines, he said. 

“Because we are convinced that the ‘we’ all together will save us. And not the ‘I’ of someone else.”