By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
Some of the nation’s leading billionaires met secretly to consider ways in which they can use their wealth to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.
According to a report by London’s Times Online, the club, known as The Good Club, met at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist in Manhattan on May 5. The afternoon meeting was so discreet even the billionaire’s aides were told they were at a “security briefing.”
The group included David Rockefeller, Jr., patriarch of one of America’s wealthiest dynasties, financiers Warren Buffet and George Soros, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York and media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Ted Turner.
The meeting was called by Bill Gates and was devoted to discussing how they could join forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learned about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.
Sketchy details of the meeting are emerging. Apparently, the billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests.
While they debated issues such as setting up rural schools and improving water systems, they all agreed to make overpopulation a priority.
“They agreed that the world’s number one problem is that there are too many poor people,” said Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, who broke the story. “And what is their solution? Get rid of the poor people.”
Calling the group “a veritable rogues gallery of anti-life and anti-family plutocrats,” Ruse said “These fabulously wealthy people with their grand houses, private jets, yachts and lavish lifestyles have decided to pool their massive resources to declare war on the world’s poor by spending billions of dollars on population control!”
One attendee, Bill Gates, 53, has not hidden his interest in investing billions in this particular cause. At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he said: “Official projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion.”
An unnamed guest at the meeting told the Times there was “nothing as crude as a vote” during the conference but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.
“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” he told the Times. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”
Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.
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STUDY QUESTIONS:
1. The Church’s position on population control policies is founded in its teaching on respect for human life and, more specifically, the use of contraception. (See No. 14 in Humanae Vitae available here: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html )
2. Pope Paul VI specifically warns about the consequences of artificial contraception falling into the hands of states with the intention of controlling population. (See the second paragraph in No. 17 in Humanae Vitae)
3. The modern population control movement got much of its impetus from a best selling book, The Population Bomb, by Stanford professor, Paul Ehrlich, a specialist in butterflies. In this book, Dr. Ehrlich predicted a variety of catastrophes due to over-population, none of which came true. Read this critical review of Dr. Ehrlich that appeared in The Stanford Review to learn more about his role in the present population control hysteria. http://www.sepp.org/Archive/controv/controversies/ehrlich.html
4. The Church has long rejected the inflated claims of population control proponents such as Ehrlich. What did Pope John XXIII have to say about these claims back in 1961? (See No. 188 in his encyclical on social teaching, Mater et Magistra, available here: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_xxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_15051961_mater_en.html )
5. Pope John Paul II compared population controllers to which Biblical figure? (See Nos. 16 in the Gospel of Life, available here: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae_en.html )
6. In his 2009 Message for World Peace, Pope Benedict XVI gives several concrete examples of how the claims of population control alarmists have proven false. (See No. 3 in “Fighting Poverty to Build Peace” available here: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20081208_xlii-world-day-peace_en.html
7. What advice does Jesus give about worries concerning our future sustenance? See Matthew 6:25-34
