Don't Sign the "Pope Francis" Global Pact

Here is his proposal for a global pact on education, and I add comments.

Video first:

Pope Francis launches Global Educational Alliance
Vatican News - English | 12.IX.2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRww7R9BL9E

Quotes and comments:

"To understand the urgency of the challenge we face, we have to focus on education."

So, educating away climate scepticism?

"which opens minds and hearts to a deeper understanding of reality."

Depends a bit on whether it is education received as such, or education imposed, despite oneself or parents or both together.

There is also a question on true and false understanding of reality.

"We need a Global Compact on Education"

To keep it free? Or to keep or make it same?

Does Sweden get more homeschoolers or US less of them in the scheme?

"aimed at developing a new universal solidarity and a new humanism"

In everyone? Is that necessary?

Universal solidarity in education, so as to have a conflict with lessened solidarity in actual politics?

Does he want a new Greta Thunberg, who is a bit too faithful to what her teachers taught ... I am not saying people like that cannot do good, and she is no more manipulated by Swedish education than any other true believer in it. But do we want a situation in which governments restrict solidarity more and more (sometimes for necessary reasons) and then education pushes someone else to the forefront?

How about adults already educated asking right now, how much solidarity are we able to afford, and how do we get it, instead of the next teen skipping both lessons and early marriage to make another protest? Early marriages and many children being what actually allows solidarity in practise, to exist and to not be suicidal.

And how universal does solidarity have to be? Must a Christian government be solidaric with Red China or with Muslim or Hindoo states that persecute Christians and - except Muslim ones - impose abortions?

"in a time of great fragmentation and extreme confrontation, we must unite our efforts, to create an educational alliance, to form mature individuals"

One does not clone and fastforward a mature individual by education who is able now to repair the fragmentation and confrontation.

And what passes for mature up to now may very well be suicidal once the confrontation gets going.

"who are able to live within society and for it."

Being able to live within society may be a virtue, though not the highest.

Being able to live for it is not.

One should live for the Heavenly society, and only after that for the Earthly. A Global Compact on Education won't help to focus on the Saints in the real Fatherland.

After the failed humanism of Greco-Roman Paganism, there was a new Humanism created, and it created the Middle Ages, however, it was not created by men living for human society, but largely by men withdrawing from it.

St. Bennett of Nursia, St. Genevieve of Paris, St. Simeon Stylites ... and before them all, St. Paul the First Hermit and St. Anthony and St. Pachomius and St. Basil, and before these, the early Carmelites in the Holy Land, back since the days of Elijah, these are the founders of the new humanism that was the Middle Ages, these were NOT "able to live within society and for it".

St. Ignatius of Loyola certainly did form men living within and nearly even for society - but he was not trying to make this the only education everywhere and anywhere. It missed out on parts of Scholasticism and eventually gave rhetoric greatness to enemies of the Faith, like Voltaire.

"Every change calls for an educational process"

Education like the one for Sweden switching from Left to Right in car traffic on the roads is so not what education is meant to be about in general. However, it may be at the centre of what "Pope Francis" wants with this Global Education Compact.

Indeed:

"We cannot create a change without educating for that change"

A Progressivist view on change being desirable and education being a means for that desire. Education should be about things that stay the same, not the next change the government or a global élite want to change.

"An African proverb says that 'it takes a whole village to educate a child'."

And where is this African proverb from? Is it universal in all Africa? Is it even universal in all Black Africa?

There are certainly villages, where this is a functioning model : every adult and older child helping to educate every child, every younger than oneself.

I do not believe these villages are the model for all of the world. Some, many, perhaps all of them were 250 years ago somehow involved in slavery, in intra-African slavery. When Portuguese thought it was OK to take African slaves, not just from formerly Muslim territories where men were eager to combat Christianity and humiliate Christian slaves, but from everywhere in Africa, in practise in Black Africa, they were referring in part to this habit of intra-African slavery, as a slave hunter is deserving to be put to death or become a slave (including prison, which is also a kind of slavery).

Meanwhile, Austrians were not having slaves, and Wolfgang and Nannerl were not educated by a whole village or by whole of Salzburg, they were homeschooled by their father.

I think Austria is better than Africa, even if the example misses that at the point, Salzburg and Austria (Inner and Outer, Upper and Nether with Vienna) were both parts of Holy Roman Empire, and Salzburg not yet a part of Austria, but a little Church State (Like Papal States or Montenegro, and like very many centuries earlier the territories around Iona or around Lindsfarne or around Bishop St. Remigius or around the hermit St. Severin of Noricum).

"But we have to create such a village"

As in, there are no villages?

"All together, we can form young people and build a better future"

Oh, wait, he meant villagising the towns or even making all of the world a single village?

Of course, as a writer, I hope to influence young people. Old people read, but are less seldom influenced. But this "all together" forming young people means less openness on part of any one young man or woman to get influenced by a writer, not approved by the "all together" or by him in ways not approved by those claiming to approve him.

I am glad I was free to read Tolkien and to draw my conclusions in ways contrary to the modern world view, contrary to the society around me in Sweden. Like approving the Franco side in the Spanish War. Is this the freedom "Pope Francis" wants to take away? His solutions seem to threaten it ...

And as for "all together" "build a better future" I think Nimrod proposed that with a rocket project. And I think he knew as little about rockets, or about how irrelevant they are to a better future, as moderns know about education. That's why God ended it, with a fragmentation of mankind into many nations divided by first of all language.

"First of all, the ground must be cleared from Discrimination, as I stated in the Document that I recently signed with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar in Abu Dhabi"

Yeah, right, the one where God wants train crashes, as I stated in my blog post on that matter.

Why "first"? What is wrong with several good efforts made separately? As they are made separately, the one who is discriminated against on one place may not be so in another.

The document, on the other hand, allows no discrimination on account of simply stating adherence to one of the major confessions, does nothing against the discrimination against Fundamentalists, and even demands a kind of Discrimination against those "seeking confrontation" as that ideology would see it.

"We have to find a way for this village"

Södra Finnskoga, or what village?

"to instill in all"

Södra Finnskoga is instilling nothing in people from Fryksdalen. People in the Klarelf Valley have a saying aboout a good schnapps "den satt godt" says the one - replies the other : "som in knif i ryggen på en Fryksdaling" = "that one fixed it" - "as a knife in the back of a Fryks Valley man" ... Now, Södra Finnskoga is a real village.

What "Pope Francis" is speaking about is not, it is a fake ideology called "global village". Suppose a global village gets to "we educate children together" it will probably also get to dreaming of killing people of the other village. The local one, which refuses globalisation because of a local custom or trade situation - or the Catholic one, which refuses it because of preserving the dogma of the faith, even if it costs discrimination.

As to

"studies and everyday life, generations, teachers and students"

they also have a way of separating people. As I found out when and after teaching in one village and that one nearer to Södra Finnskoga than to the Fryks Valley. When I had at least learned the local dialect well enough to dare to speak it, I had no longer anyone to speak it to.

No, studies, teachers, students, they are not THE things that unite people, and they do NOT always unite them, and when they do, often against someone else.

And I had forgotten about uniting all aspects of a person within him.

"family"

Usually, yes, but there are warnings in the Gospel for some situations.

"civil society in its intellectual, scientific, business and charitable dimensions"

Even when some of these get rotten to the core?

An intellect flirting with Ibn Khaldun? A scientific status quo accepted by civil society more than just flirting with Heliocentrism, Acentrism, Relativity, Big Bang, Abiogenesis, Darwinism, Millions and Billions of years, man becoming so gradually? Charities reducing every guest to the status of "should be looking for job and apartment" whatever his project, like in my case writer? And backbiting him before for instance police or psychologists or psychiatrists if he refuses to comply? That latter is what I think was done to me more than just once. I could be wrong, the charities could be innocent.

For other charities, I am sure not to be wrong when they have arranged for some people being able to be there for me to "talk me out of" Creationism, when it's these people who were less competent in relevant fields than I, even though they were into scientific rather than lettered pursuits.

Pitting hunger and the desire for coffee in a morning one woke up too soon against integrity and standing up for what one is trying to do is hardly uniting all aspects of my person. In the larger fields, these false ideas are not uniting people between them, except against others.

As for the business dimension, we know there will be a day when this unites the people living for earthly society against Christians. Unless it is already here.

"We need to make sure that, in this village,"

A village - properly so called - can manage itself, but the world, global élites, cannot manage a village. And that is alas what is mean by "we".

"a global convergence"

What did I just say?

"leads to an alliance between the earth's inhabitants and our 'common home',"

No one (presumably, with exception for evil conspirers who would hardly admit so openly) wants enmity with our home (beyond what God imposed, see Genesis 3, thistles and thorns growing in our way), but people differ on how an "alliance" should look.

A "global convergence" means some people override other people at very different coordinates, because they have better global connexions.

"so that education may bring peace and justice"

Repeat that in Méjico, if you like, especially on the tombs of fallen Cristeros!

Say it to a grandchild of one, and to a grandchild faithful to his grandfather, you may even get a funny look.

"and openness among all peoples of the human family"

I have, since being homeless, noted, the more foreigners from outside Europe there are in a University, the less tolerance there is for a homeless - no matter how many terms he studied before being homeless - to sit in University Libraries or use computers of an Institution.

You see, Paris and Oxford arose around beggar students (even if Paris soon got Colleges, Sorbonne and Navarre for instance, to change this awkward situation), but to a Japanese or an African, a University is a place of privilege and status and a poor man the reverse, they don't see the connexion.

"and dialogue among religions."

Unfortunately, several Catholics are all too familiar with being told to shut up their contribution to dialogue which was an apologetic one.

Sometimes this is excused by telling them it was bad delivery, unpolite or whatever, but often in such cases, the one thing that was unpolite was simply insisting Catholicism is actually true. Or answering back angrily or even with milder irritation when some Protestant was treating one as childish because Catholic.

So, when "Pope Francis" says "dialogue among religions", one basically can know, he means a dialogue where other religions are allowed to dialogue high up on excluding topics from Catholic view, while their own or close enough are not respecting that exclusion.

A bit like Young Earth Creationism and Geocentrism are also excluded.

"A universal village, that is also a personal village which belongs to all."

I think personal villages belonging to all are much better made locally than globally.

When he goes on to root educational processes or the educational process, why not just education, in the awareness of an interconnected world and new solutions on every plane, he is basically asking for scares and hysterias all over the place.

Some would class Greta Thunberg as one and are asking who is manipulating her. The answer is Swedish education is and was manipulating her and her classmates and about everyone else in Sweden on all these issues. She is no more or less manipulated than everyone else, or nearly everyone. Her own initiative was acting on information or disinformation available to all, as far as one can humanly see. She is very far from the ugliest phenomenon imaginable, she has not even been very concrete about what solutions she wants, so she is not in fact promoting a definite and definitely wrong solution, except on the plane of leaving too much to what is publically perceived as scientific consenus and to experts belonging to the school which to the public is presented as consensual.

Others may promote real bad solutions and think it their vocation because being young they are the right age for the need to "find other ways to envisage" this, that or sundry.

"I invite each of you to be committed to this alliance."

That commitment could be some aspect of the mark of the beast.

He is inviting authoritative figures in our world already engaged in education, and he is hoping to educate men willing to offer themselves up "for the community" probably neither the Catholic nor national one, still less their own family, getting married, but international secularism.

He is inviting the undertaking of change without fear. Well, internationally directed change is to be feared. Even when one has been good, it has opened up doors for other changes internationally imposed that were bad. UNO is a bad partner and a worse master.