Columbia University professor Jeffrey D. Sachs is special adviser to U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon and to Pope Francis.  As director of the Earth Institute, globalist Sachs is spreading palm branches, as it were, before the Holy Father’s delivery of a major papal encyclical to American bishops and the United Nations in September.  In an essay entitled “A Call to Virtue,” published in the Jesuit journal America, Sachs predicts that Pope Francis will directly challenge the “American idea of God-given rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

The media luminary postulates that America is “a society in thrall” of the idea of unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  In the treatise, Professor Sachs attempts to integrate the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Thomas Payne, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Jesus Christ in support of Pope Francis’s compassionate Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (the joy of the Gospel), which the pontiff proclaims can help the world to overcome the globalization of indifference to others.

The cagey writer prudently avoids negatively charged media catchphrases such as population control, abortion, anthropogenic global warming, socialism, and one-world government, while enhancing his hypotheses with feel-good words like virtue, justice, and charity.  “Pope Francis sees a crisis of the human spirit in our time,” declares the macroeconomist, “characterized by our inability to hear the suffering of others. We suffer a poverty of the spirit in the midst of material plenty, a failure to live properly in an age of unprecedented material affluence.”  While Sachs stops short of indicting American constitutional ideology for these moral failures, the implication is conspicuous.

Metaphorically comparing the twenty-first-century challenges of social compassion to a moral balance sheet, the Vatican adviser weighs the economic costs of extreme global poverty and controlling epidemic diseases likes AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and Ebola against Earth-friendly environmental solutions such as solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric power vs. climate-changing fossil fuels.

He advances the Aristotelian principle asserting that the “state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part.”  Aristotle does not mean that the state can willfully crush the individual, but rather that the individual finds meaning in life, and the path to happiness, as a citizen of the polis, the state.  In a phrase that reverberates powerfully still today, Aristotle noted that “man is a social animal.”

Directly referring to American constitutional ideology, Sachs writes, “[W]e learn that the route to happiness lies in the rights of the individual. Most important, the rebellious American colonists believed that they would find happiness as individuals, each endowed by the creator with individual, inalienable  rights.”  He refers to this as ideology of grandeur, declaring that such rights are only one facet of our humanity.

Advancing the inevitability of a borderless one-world government, Sachs proclaims that the United Nations must “dictate the course of nations and individual rights must be sacrificed for the greater good.”  In his book, The End of Poverty, he advocates extracting more than $845 billion from the American people through global taxation in order to finance what he calls “Sustainable Development Goals,” as envisioned by a Sustainable Development Solutions Network run by none other than Jeffrey Sachs.

On Sept. 25, Pope Francis will speak to the largest number of assembled heads of state in history.  Professor Sachs seems convinced that these leaders will adopt new Sustainable Development Goals for the coming generation.  The pontiff will come to the United States and the United Nations in New York on the 70^th anniversary of the United Nations, and at the moment when the world’s 193 governments are resolved to take a step in solidarity toward a better world.  These lofty goals will be a new worldwide commitment to build a world that aims to harmonize the pursuit of economic prosperity with the commitments to social inclusion and environmental sustainability.  

If Mr. Sachs’s predictions become reality, America as an exceptional sovereign nation will meld into a communal member of the New World Order.

 God forbid!