The article, written by the philosopher Stefano Fontana, said that the document did not contain a single "explicit or implicit reference to God."
Noting that this was the pontifical academy's second text on the pandemic, he wrote: "Just like the preceding document, this one too says nothing: above all it says nothing about life, which is the specific competence of the pontifical academy, and it also says nothing Catholic, that is to say anything inspired by the teaching of Our Lord."
He continued: "One wonders who actually writes these documents. From the way these authors write, they seem to be anonymous functionaries of an anonymous institution of sociological studies. Their goal is to coin slogan-phrases in order to capture a snapshot of unspecified processes that are currently underway."
Fontana concluded: "There is no doubt: it is a document that will please many people among the global elite. But it will displease -- if they even read it and understand it -- those who want the Pontifical Academy for Life to actually be the Pontifical Academy for Life."
In response, Mastrofini urged critics to read three texts relating to the pontifical academy together. The first was Pope Francis' 2019 letter "Humana Communitas" to the pontifical academy. The second was the academy's March 30 note on the pandemic and the third was the most recent document.
He wrote: "As John XXIII said, it is not the Gospel that changes, it is we who understand it better and better. This is the work that the Pontifical Academy for Life is doing, in constant discernment: faith, the Gospel, the passion for humanity, expressed in the concrete events of our time."
"This is why a debate on the merits of the contents of these three documents, to be read together, would be important. I do not know, at this point, whether philological 'accounting' work on how many times a few key words recur in a text is useful."