To: Mrs. Don-o
All human activities have to do with ethics, the Argentinean archbishop said, so they are already within the jurisdiction of the pope. He's right insofar as we are discussing their ethical dimension. But whether or not human activity is warming the earth, and to what extent, is absolutely not an ethical question. It's a purely scientific one, and the church has no business picking sides there.
But, for the archbishop, swimming with the zeitgeist is a lot easier than actually teaching the hard truths of Catholicism, so there is that. /s
60 posted on
07/20/2017 10:08:51 AM PDT by
Campion
(Halten Sie sich unbedingt an die Lehre!)
To: Campion
Right you are. And there's a big difference between saying that all human activities have to do with ethics, and saying all human choices are straight up-and-don moral choices. A whole lot of them are in fact prudential choices, i.e., when various options are allowable based on various evaluations of the facts, or even various (non-sinful) preferences.
For instance: Feed the hungry: a divine command. Do it by:
- Slashing the taxation/regulation burden on small farm producers
- OR: running a church-sponsored soup kitchen,
- OR: getting philanthropies to distribute vegetable seeds and sponsor gardening classes in all poor neighborhoods,
- OR extending EBT eligibility,
- OR: restricting EBT use to essential nutrition staples only;
- OR: lowering the minimum wage, so more entry-level jobs can be created and people can earn money and feed themselves.
- OR: starting a micro-credit corporation to capitalize myriad small business start-ups in areas of high unemployment;
- OR: enacting a big tax incentive for retailers and wholesalers to donate past-sell-by inventory to Food Banks;
- OR sweeping all the homeless off the streets and put them in therapeutic residences with treatment, work assignments and meals
- OR giving every panhandler a tenner out of your own pocket,
- OR getting charity foundations to hire neighborhood-based small caterers to cater meals to the indigent elderly/disabled
- OR: handing out sandwiches out of your own front door;
- OR: a dozen, a hundred more possible AND/ORs.
All these choices are allowable; every one of them is a prudential judgment, not "a human activity and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Pope" (!!).
61 posted on
07/20/2017 2:37:38 PM PDT by
Mrs. Don-o
(Pity this busy monster, manunkind)
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