The Vatican hosted religious leaders along with CEOs of large pharmaceutical companies, New Age preachers and celebrities who advocate on global health in a Zoom conference entitled “Exploring the Mind, Body, and Soul: How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health”.
Cura Foundation president Robin Smith and Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi gave the opening remarks. Cardinal Ravasi said that “the body is a fundamental reality of human existence and of communication” and pointed to Christianity’s central mystery, the Incarnation.
Also on the first day Dr Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden, responded to questions from CNN journalist Sanjay Gupta, who asked him how much doctors “have to rely on faith, not just religious faith, but your own system of belief” when confronting something new, such as Covid-19.
“I think you have to rely on it when you’re starting with nothing,” Fauci said. But he added: “As more solid scientific information becomes available, you pull away a bit from the kind of experience, instinct and get more into the reality of the evidence you have.”
Deepak Chopra, a leading light of the New Age movement, talked with Dr Rudolf Tanzi about inflammation and the brain, in a conversation moderated by surgeon and television personality Dr Mehmet Oz. Asked about the relation between mind and body, Chopra said: “One of the fundamental questions in science is called ‘the hard problem of consciousness’: how do we experience thoughts, feelings, emotions, insight, intuition, inspiration, creativity, vision, even reverence for God?”
The question is: “How does the brain do that? Is the mind doing the brain or the brain doing the mind? And right now, the conversation seems to be neither is doing each other.”
He continued: “Consciousness is more fundamental.” It is “what spiritual traditions call the soul and cognitive scientists call the conscious agent … It doesn’t matter what you call it... there’s an underlying field of awareness, of consciousness, which modulates itself and differentiates itself into conscious agents which we call souls.”
On the second day of the conference, last week, Chelsea Clinton, 41, vice-chair of the Clinton Foundation, said during a discussion on building a more equitable health system in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic that there should be regulation of “anti-vaccine content” on social media.
On the third day, Pope Francis and anthropologist Jane Goodall, famous for her work with chimpanzees, both offered perspectives on “what it means to be human”. In a video message the Pope said that St Augustine’s words in his Confessions are timeless: “Man is himself a great deep.
“The Scriptures, and philosophical and theological reflection in particular, have employed the concept of ‘soul’ to define our uniqueness as human beings and the specificity of the person, which is irreducible to any other living being and includes our openness to a supernatural dimension and thus to God,” the Pope said.
Goodall responded: “I think where we fit into the picture of primates is we are the fifth great ape, and our closest relative among the other great apes… Well, there’s two of them, actually, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. We differ from each other genetically by only just over 1 per cent.” But the “explosive development of the intellect” has not given us a reason to label ourselves as Homo sapiens, the wise ape, she said. “We’re not wise. We’ve seen what Mars looks like. We don’t want to live there. We’ve only got this one planet, at least in our lifetimes, and we’re destroying it.”
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin also addressed the conference on 8 May. Human beings are distinguished from animals by rationality, “a high degree of self-understanding” and reflection on others and the universe, he said.
“Another unique feature is the moral conscience that allows us to act by distinguishing between what is good and what is bad. … A strong moral sense pushes us to denounce and take actions that put an end to injustices through philanthropic and solidarity actions that counteract the manifestations of evil.”
The conference website listed more than 100 speakers, including Kerry Kennedy, Cindy Crawford, John Sculley, Brandon Marshall, Joe Perry of the rock band Aerosmith, and Mgr Dario Edoardo Viganò, prefect emeritus of the Vatican Secretariat for Communications.