Posted on 06/20/2015 8:29:02 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A quasi-religious movement now has a genuinely religious leader.
The pope’s encyclical on the environment is being hailed for its embrace of science, although it is about as scientific as the Catholic hymnal.
Pope Francis writes that Sister Earth “now cries out because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.” Really? Is that what the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says?
I’m not Catholic, but I respect the pope’s humility and am moved by his love for the handicapped and his concern for the vulnerable. The Catholic Church is one of the pillars of Western civilization, and it has brought comfort and meaning to the lives of countless millions of people down through the millennia.
That doesn’t mean that climate science, economic policy, cost-benefit analysis are its core competencies. No one has ever said: Yes, but what did Gregory VII do to fight the onset of the Medieval Warm Period?
The pope’s at times lyrical encyclical draws on a beautiful tradition of respect for nature and its creatures represented by the pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, and is suffused with an intense regard for the poor. But anyone who takes the encyclical as a serious guide to public policy deserves a stern talking to from the nearest tough-minded, ruler-wielding nun.
All that matters to the media, though, is that Pope Francis has taken a simplistic apocalyptic climate alarmism and given it the imprimatur of the Vatican. The same people who are unwilling to give the pope the time of day on more central moral matters, like the dignity of life, are now attributing to him an authority that might have made Pope Innocent III, who challenged kings, blush.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter because only the climate-change passages will get much play, but the document could have benefited from an editor cutting out the bizarre ramblings.
The pope writes of “harmful habits of consumption,” including “the increasing use and power of air conditioning.” This apparently is the result of an insidious capitalistic dynamic: “The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.”
That’s assuming the outsider lives in a very cool climate, or doesn’t mind sweating. Anyone not so lucky probably thinks the inventor of air conditioning should be canonized. In France about 10 years ago, roughly 15,000 mostly elderly people died during a heat wave, in part because they lacked the aforementioned wasteful air conditioning.
The pope is also skeptical of automobiles, which are, after all, a suspiciously recent innovation: “Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of nonrenewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape.”
If saving the planet, or our souls, depends on giving up air conditioning or cars, we are all indeed on the road to perdition. The pope at one point favorably cites the example of the desert monks. But while living a life of contemplation in the middle of nowhere suited St. Anthony of Egypt just fine — he is reputed to have lived to 105 — most of us aren’t spiritual superheroes, nor does monasticism as a general matter tell us anything useful about improving the lives of the poor.
While the pope pays lip service to technological advances, he doesn’t truly appreciate their wonders. The Industrial Revolution was one of the greatest boons to humankind. Consider the unrelieved misery — the disease, the poverty, the illiteracy — before around 1800, when if you weren’t an aristocrat, a general, or a bishop, your life was probably nasty, brutish and short. Mass industrialization launched the world on a radically different material trajectory.
“The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 B.C.,” Gregory Clark writes in his book, “A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.” “Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: 30 to 35 years. Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800.”
But at least when everyone died at a much earlier age, we weren’t engaging in the ravages of the planet that so exercise Francis. This sinful assault on the Earth, by the way, largely consisted in taking otherwise completely useless glop from the ground and using it to power economic and technical advances that enriched average people beyond anyone’s imagining. This is obviously a secular miracle of the highest order, although the religiously inclined might think: Thank God for fossil fuels, and above all, for the human ingenuity that figured out what to do with them.
And the bounty hasn’t ended. Something like a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in places like India and China in recent decades as they have embraced markets and global trade. The pope should be delighted, except he has a blinkered view of capitalism as a zero-sum game benefiting only the privileged.
In this vein, he writes of the “ecological debt” that exists “between the global north and south.” Well, if we are going to speak of debts, the global north gave the global south the modern world. (You’re welcome.) The best thing that can happen to the developing world now is that it can follow our example of growth driven in part by cheap energy. It will enrich them, uplift their poor, give them more wherewithal to adapt to future changes in the climate, and — over time, one hopes — foster forms of government that are accountable to their people and respect their rights.
For all that the pope portrays modern development as a long exercise in environmental devastation, it is the advanced countries that have the cleanest water and air, and are best prepared to adapt their way around any far-off environmental challenges. The pope is right to be skeptical of a blind-faith in technological fixes. Of course they can’t cure what ails the human soul; they can solve seemingly insuperable problems. Perhaps Francis should put a visit to the dikes of Holland on his next itinerary.
His encyclical will be portrayed as the best thing the Church has done since Pope Leo dissuaded Attila from sacking Rome, but on climate change, it merely bends to the fashions of the hour.
Doubters of the Catholic church have been saying good-bye to it for a couple thousand years now....but here it is....Just as Christ promised it would be!!! L
I seem to recall the last time the Latin church “embraced science” it was defending Aristotelian celestial mechanics just as it was coming undone as a serious scientific theory.
Might it be that the very advantages to physical living gained by the industrial era, also made it possible to indulge in the thought that was going to demonize the means of these advantages?
Depends on what you view as the heart.
If it’s the officials, you might be in for some trouble.
If it’s the Lord Jesus Christ, you can take a calmer view.
He’s downplaying the power of God, which the episcopal church has been doing for some time. God is always God, and he always has power over the Earth and beyond.
Maybe the Pope is trying to do some sort of advanced psychological jujitsu move on the lefties.
Well this is pretty sick, that must be admitted.
God is capable of such cleverness... I doubt that Francis is.
Just wondering. If the pope is protected by G-d why does he need a bullet proof car. Just asking.
As a young child in Catholic school, one of those ruler weilding nuns taught me a lesson. The planet will also soon teach the Pope and his AGW Acolytes a big lesson. In about 2 to 3 years after the current El Nino fades away to a massive La Nina.
I think you're right.
I’ve got a spare bedroom here in southern Arizona. The Pope can come spend the summer with me. I’ll shut off the air conditioning to his room so he won’t be distracted from his pious thoughts and care for the poor with artificially cooled air.
It is supposed to hit 108 tomorrow, but I’m sure he won’t mind sweating a little to save Mother Gaia.
Pope: bought and paid for by the NWO.
Your church is killing itself. And when exactly did Christ use the word “pope”?
L
With all due respect, he's Jesuit.
First, last and always.
That too.
Didn't Jim Morrison write that?
when exactly did Christ use the word “bible”?
Let’s see just how ‘liberal’ this Pope really is when the time comes to address the scandal of homosexual priests who have blackened the name of the Catholic church for decades-and yet the Catholic hierarchy, and no doubt, this Pope, refuse to even use the word ‘homosexual’ when it comes to pedophiles in the church who caused the vast majority of the damage!
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