VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis has appointed Cardinal Peter Turkson the new Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
The Ghanaian cardinal was appointed Monday to succeed the Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, who had been in that role since 1998.
In recent years, both Turkson and Sorondo have made headlines for statements contrary to Church teaching and in line with the ideology of population control.
Turkson, 73, who served as the first Prefect for the Dicastery for Promoting of Integral Human Development from 2017 to 2021, promotes environmentalist ideas. He has publicly praised teen environmental activist Greta Thunberg, describing her as “a great witness to what the Church teaches on the care for the environment.”
Turkson also appears to be a believer in population control.
In 2015, the Ghanaian cardinal had to explain himself following a controversial BBC interview in which he claimed that Pope Francis had called for “a certain amount of birth control” to tackle lack of food and environmental issues, thus giving credence to the theory that the planet is overpopulated.
More recently, Turkson supported the idea that pro-abortion president Joe Biden should continue to be admitted to Holy Communion. The cardinal asserted that the abortion-promoting, dissident “Catholic” Democrat is not in a “state of sin” and that “the Eucharist should not in any way become a weapon.”
The newly appointed Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences also supports population control advocates.
Turkson has served for years as the Vatican’s top liaison to the World Economic Forum, the group behind the infamous “Great Reset” scheme “to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies.”
He has joined at least five annual summits of the World Economic Forum (WEF) during Pope Francis’ pontificate, including in 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020, often delivering remarks from the pope or hosting the Vatican’s own WEF “roundtable.”
The “Great Reset,” which seeks to enshrine socialistic “stakeholder capitalism” as the dominant global economic model, includes “LGBTI Inclusion” as a key theme. “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed,” WEF founder Klaus Schwab said of the initiative in June.
Among the WEF’s LGBT programs was a project last summer to promote “LGBTQI+ inclusion during the COVID-19 crisis” in collaboration with the Thomas Reuters Foundation and Salesforce – two of the many pro-LGBT organizations on Pope Francis’s council for “inclusive capitalism.”
In January, Turkson joined the WEF once again for the Forum’s most recent summit, which specifically centered around the “Great Reset.” In an interview with the National Catholic Register shortly after, Turkson explained the Vatican’s involvement with the WEF, saying “we need to be open” to the Reset.
“We need to have our eyes a bit more open to all of this because, since the pandemic began last winter, Pope Francis invited us to create a commission to follow this,” he said, referring to the Vatican COVID-19 Commission, which Turkson oversees.
Last December, Turkson resigned from his position as prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, just a few months following an inspection of the Dicastery ordered by Pope Francis and led by Cardinal Cupich of Chicago.
Cardinal Sorondo’s record has been no less controversial.
In 2018, Sorondo praised China’s communist regime, saying it was “best [at] implementing the social doctrine of the Church.” That same year, he dismissed experts’ warnings about China’s horrendous practice of organ harvesting.
Two years later, in 2o20, Sorondo defended giving Holy Communion to the pro-abortion president of Argentina and his mistress on the occasion of their visit to the Vatican.
The 79-year-old is also a firm promoter of climate change ideology.