Posted on 12/15/2009 8:16:38 AM PST by Pyro7480
Pope Benedict XVI called for urgent action to protect the environment, saying Tuesday that climate change and natural catastrophes threaten the rights to life, food, health — and ultimately peace.
In his annual message on the Roman Catholic Church's World Day of Peace, the pope argued that the world's economic, social, and environmental problems are moral crises that require mankind to rethink its way of living.
"We can no longer do without a real change of outlook which will result in new life-styles," he said, touching again on a theme that has earned him a reputation as the "green pope."...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
No, he flatout says “environmental problems ... are MORAL crises.”. Behave morally and the “crisis” subsides.
All of the objections from fellow FReepeers, so far, are objections not to what the Pope said, but to what the AP said he said.
The whole Papal emphasis on subsidiarity --- the multi-layering of responsibilities with regard to the production and provision of food, access to healthcare, conservation of our God-given gifts of air, water, croplands, forests, seas --- points toward personal responsibility and private/local activity, and away from tyrannical national and global mechanisms.
The Creator-centered and Creation-oriented view of nature-- also emphasized by the Pope--- are also directly opposed to the aggressive misanthropic Gaia-paganism of secular ecology.
I implore my fellow FReepers to give a look at This Post--- and my comments on the Eco-Apocalypse vs the Pope.
And if you don't trust the MSM with regards to Sarah Palin, kindly exercise the same common sense with regard to their "interpretive" reporting on the Pope.
Well, there ain't gonna be no more cartoons for either of us if your eco-freak, paleaoconservative buddies put us back in the Middle Ages!
I'm beginning to understand Saruman's point of view. ;-)
LOL. It’s all about a restoration of the proper balance. The Internet need to be discarded so easily.
That should be, The Internet need NOT be discarded so easily.
Yes, morally in the CHRISTIAN sense, not in the neo-pagan Al Gore sense. See the part I boldfaced above.
Precisely! “Moral” does not equal “socialist.”. Quite the contrary in fact.
Green is the new red. I don’t like hearing him called that.
"... the world's economic, social, and environmental problems are moral crises that require mankind to rethink its way of living. We can no longer do without a real change of outlook which will result in new life-styles," he said.
First, like his last encyclical, if he intended for his words to mean something else why didn't he write with greater clarity? This confusing mish-mash sounds like something read from Obama's teleprompter!
Secondly, the holy Father should concentrate on the saving of souls and the saving of Christ's Church.
I am a practical, practicing Catholic who believes Benedict speaks like a humanist.
For better or for worse, (sigh), this Ratzinger guy is a philosopher. He actually writes very carefully and fruitfully: but not, perhaps, with sufficient safeguards against the cultural vandals who rip out bumper-sticker-sized quotes and then add dump-truck loads of Newspeak interpretation.
"Pearls before swine."
Excellent point, but don't hold your breath...
The Creator-centered and Creation-oriented view of nature-- also emphasized by the Pope--- are also directly opposed to the aggressive misanthropic Gaia-paganism of secular ecology.
This is a convoluted, confused miasma which damages the Church by confusing others as to how the pope sees the Roman Catholic Church's perceived mission.
“Green is the new red.”
I missed that proclamation.
The saving of souls: what do you think he prays for and works for every day of his life? But what are you expecting...AP coverage of that?
Pope Benedict clearly sees the anti-human trends of gaia-ecology. He's tried to make a statement placing conservation concerns within the moral nature and eternal destiny of Man (that's what that "human ecology" term is all about)--- but like I said to Pyro, it's lost in transmission. He should do like Sarah Palin and communicate by Facebook: do an end-run around the whole garbage media.
After Benedict became Pope I purchased a book wherein he had written a mini-thesis for each day of the year. I found the work to be as confusing as what we are discussing here and I am far from uneducated.
His writings sound humanistic, or like the thoughts of a modernist which the Church has had and still suffers from entirely too much of.
I just finished Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth and found it one of the best books on Jesus I've read. His style seems much simpler and clearer than that of --- for instance--- John Paul II, which always gave me the impression of having been written in Polish and then translated successively into Latin, then French, then gobbledy-English (like that old "telephone" game we played as kids.)
Did you bother to read what I said? Just because left-wing enviro-whackos took over the environmental movement doesn’t mean that we don’t have an obligation to protect the environment.
What we need to do, however, is to take back the environmental movement and organizations, most of which were originally conservative. What we need is to really take care of nature, not to swallow the left wing koolaid.
Maybe you really think we can pollute all we want and screw up the environment as much as we want, like the Chinese, who are poisoning whole regions of their country and dying from the food they grow there. No, that’s not the answer either. Common sense is the answer.
excellent point....His Holiness has thrown in with a crowd that wants to implement China’s One Child policy on a global basis! (oh, but the clergy is so increditly smart they are going to negotiate acceptably Catholic ways around that, just like they are doing with Obamacare....)
Not to mention I think it reveals a distinct lack of faith to believe that man is even capable of destroying God’s planet.
Just a small correction - this document is a "message" (for world day of peace 2010), not an encyclical.
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