| Photo by Rick Covic on Unsplash
Part XIX of a “Cancer/Medical Moonshot” Series
Pope Leo XIV urged transplant professionals to “keep the good of the patient as your guiding principle,” highlighting organ donation as a “noble and meritorious act.” Addressing last Thursday, March 26, 2026, at Italy’s National Transplant Center, he stressed the importance of ethical vigilance, respect for human dignity, and the need to reject any commercialization of the human body.
The Italian National Transplant Center is commemorating 70 years since the first organ donation in Italy. The Vatican knows the world’s second-deadliest disease, as Pope John XXIII died of stomach cancer on June 3, 1963. While many popes died from various infections or cardiac issues, detailed, definitive causes of death for all 266+ popes throughout history have not always been documented or recorded with modern medical terminology, cures, and procedures.
This column now respectfully asks if Pope Leo XIV and the State of the Vatican can lead, or even better, spearhead the “War on Cancer”? As discussed in Part X of this series, Filipinos and Overseas Filipinos could request their government to devote 100% of the “Value Added Tax” (VAT) collections every year to invest in a national federation of provincial healthcare co-ops and agricultural-based labor cooperatives of farmers, fishermen, retailers, and operators of “Memorial Tree Parks”.
Then poverty could be eliminated in two to three decades, or even sooner. Farmers could produce high-value products such as cacao, coffee, tea, seaweed, and other marine products if they were organized into co-ops. Yes, cooperatives are partly funded by stakeholders like Filipinos, Overseas Filipinos, their kin, foreign friends, and in-laws. Plus capital from VAT, as the Philippine government equity in said ventures. VAT revenues total the equivalent of U.S. $11- $14 billion per year.
More than 175 countries worldwide, including nearly all Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members except the United States, impose a value-added tax (VAT) or similar goods-and-services tax (GST) on consumption. This widespread adoption makes it a primary source of government revenue globally, covering over 170 to 175 countries and jurisdictions. Perhaps the world’s churches and other denominations can lobby civilian governments to allocate VAT revenues to healthcare and to investment in rural cooperatives designed to empower their marginalized citizens.
Gun violence among civilians, medical and social cancers, other diseases, and pandemics cause more deaths per year than civil wars on all the continents. It has been advanced by some statisticians that all forms of cancer alone caused the deaths in the past two decades more than those civilians and soldiers who died during World Wars I and II. The medical versions of cancer result annually in fatalities globally that exceed 10 million individuals, at a minimum. And added to the total are tens of millions more cancer survivors who affect the economic survival of their closest kin and in-laws.
“If the Vatican joins the “Cancer/Medical Moonshot” proposal as one of its prime movers, the greater the chances that it would be launched sooner and succeed faster — starting in the Philippines.”
After Cardinal Robert F. Prevost was elected the first pope of American descent and the first Augustinian missionary to head the Vatican, this column started a series addressed to His Holiness. It was called “Fourteen Letters to Pope Leo XIV”. The first letter was about the Vatican helping end violence and homelessness in the Philippines.
After all, the new pope is an Augustinian missionary. And the Augustinian friars were the first to begin, in 1565, the conversion of the native peoples of what became the Philippines to Christianity. After more than 330 years as a Spanish colony, it became the only predominantly Catholic country in the Far East. Then, as head of the Order of Saint Augustine, he visited the Augustinian Province of Cebu (Philippines) on numerous occasions.
If the Vatican joins the “Cancer/Medical Moonshot” proposal as one of its prime movers, the greater the chances that it would be launched sooner and succeed faster — starting in the Philippines. The Vatican is the headquarters of the world’s largest Christian Church, with more than 225,000 parishes, hundreds of Catholic universities, medical centers, cancer institutes and wards, and other scientific causes and concerns.
By this Holy Wednesday, this column will talk about North Carolina’s Mother Teresa Parish’s “A.N.G.E.L.S.” It is an acronym this columnist coined, meaning “America’s Newest Givers of Empathy, Love, and Support”. The parish ANGELS have literally and figuratively been doing some of Mother Teresa’s humanitarian work. Yes, like caring for parishioners who are sick, dying, or even abandoned, for which she was awarded the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps Pope Leo XIV can motivate many of the Catholic Church’s 225,000 other parishes to have their own flocks of ANGELS, too, as part of the “War on Cancer” that the Vatican will hopefully spearhead worldwide.
