"One should doubtless keep an open mind...though open at both ends, like the food pipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake." -- Northrop Frye, 'The Great Code'
The president of the largest Roman Catholic University in America refused a conservative student group's request to post pro-life posters because it would constitute "bigotry ... under the cover of free speech."
Despite the fact that "Black Lives Matter" posters hang on the very windows of the administrative offices at Chicago-based DePaul University, President Reverend Dennis H. Holtschneider banned posters reading "Unborn Lives Matter," a message much more in keeping with Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death. ...
When po-mo, pc identity politics start infecting the thinking at Catholic universities you know the culture war is being lost. President Holtshneider has defected to the enemy's side. Though it would appear that this has been happening for some time. And considering some of Pope Francis's rhetoric on global warming and capitalism, the entire Catholic Church is lurching in that direction.
The papal Laudato Si’
encyclical on global warming ....
has prompted reportedly heated exchanges between senior church figures,
at a recent top level meeting in Rome.
"...Argentinean Bishop ... Sorondo, a close advisor to Pope Francis ... stressed that thepope’s declarations on the gravity of global
warming ... are magisterial
teaching equivalent to the teaching that abortion is sinful.
... Father Joseph Fessio, SJ ... who obtained his
doctorate in theology under Joseph Ratzinger ... told LifeSiteNews, “Neither the pope nor Bishop Sorondo
can speak on a matter of science with any binding authority, so to use
the word ‘magisterium’ in both cases is equivocal at best, and ignorant
in any case.” Fr. Fessio added, “To equate a papal position on abortion
with a position on global warming is worse than wrong; it is an embarrassment for the Church.” "
... The Pope does not fit into normal political categories. He is a hybrid
of social conservatism and socialism, which made his speech an
inevitable mixed bag, a platter of papal platitudes peppered with
elements of controversy, some carefully-padded, some not.
Dr. John Christy, climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville responds to the Pope's encyclical:
...We have a “moral imperative” to burn carbon dioxide-emitting fossil
fuels because the energy they provide is a “liberator” of humanity ...
...“We are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the
energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be
brutal ... On the contrary, we are good people for doing so."
... Carbon-based energy, which is “the most affordable and reliable source
of energy in demand today, liberates people from poverty,” ... “Without energy, life is brutal and short.”
The Pope has been attacking "unbridled capitalism", "greed" and "climate change" as the source of all evil in the modern world. This is both ignorant and weird because:
(1) the first world, where poverty is least prevalent and justice, democracy and freedom most prevalent got that way in no small measure thanks to free market capitalism. Furthermore, nowhere in the first world is capitalism "unbridled". It is very bridled, and in most cases too bridled.
(2) all the third world hell-holes on the planet (many of them very Catholic, by the way) are suffering from grinding poverty, injustice and lack of freedom because they are subject to unbridled totalitarianism, unbridled socialism and/or unbridled dictatorship.Why doesn't Pope Francis speak up against these evils? If he had half a clue, he would.
Get a grip, Francis! Those leftists who love to quote your careless rhetoric are not your friends. In fact most are at best indifferent (many are hostile) to religion and not a few despise the Catholic Church in particular. And, encouraging them like this will lead to more poverty and suffering in the world, not less.
Update: I particularly liked this comment in the NP article, from EarlP
... His failure to understand the good that has been done in the world by
capitalists and capitalism, actually leaves him in the position of
becoming a useful id#ot (as Lenin might have said) for those opposed to
the promotion and expansion of liberty and democracy.
We need a little more John Paul II, and a lot less Hugo Chavez from this Pope.
... The advisors’ “transformative solutions’’ ... would slow the ongoing broad advance in human wellbeing, retard
poverty reduction, and reduce the ability to adapt and cope with
adversity in general and climate change in particular, especially
harming the poor.
... it is a strange ethical calculus that justifies reducing existing gains
in human well-being, increasing the cost of humanity’s basic
necessities, increasing poverty ... The Vatican’s advisors’moral compasses are apparently broken.
Mr. Goklany's excellent assessment echos Peter Foster's (and others') here and here.
Secular progressives ordinarily have nothing but disdain, even hate, for Catholic (or any other Christian faith's) moral teachings. But when the Pope foolishly expounds on a controversial scientific matter in a way that appears to align with their own beliefs, these same progressives suddenly declare that he's the man we all must carefully heed.
Brian Lilley amplifies:
One has to wonder if the Pope realizes that his climate encyclical has put him in league with Catholicism's enemies.
...Pope Francis’ climate Encyclical, Laudato Si’ (Praise Be), could have
come from any branch of the UN, any environmental NGO, or the World
Economic Forum. This is hardly surprising since they all promote Global
Salvationism, which is based on projections of doom to be countered by
morally-charged, UN-centric, globally-governed sustainable development
and corporate social responsibility.
... The Pope appears to be blinded by a moral vision that he shares not just
with Strong and Gorbachev but with Naomi Klein, Al Gore and David
Suzuki: capitalism is evil, is destroying the earth, and involves
oppression of the poor and a zero-sum struggle for resources that
promotes war.
... The Encyclical demonizes wicked, heartless and short-sighted straw men.
This unnamed “they” are proponents of “throwaway culture” and
“compulsive consumerism,” of “rampant individualism” and the
“self-centred culture of instant gratification.” They claim “an
unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot.” ...
... It is a cruel irony that, while it was science which, more than anything
else, was able by its great achievements to establish the age of
reason, it is all too many climate scientists and their hangers-on who
have become the high priests of a new age of unreason.
... But what moves me most is that the policies invoked in its name are grossly immoral.
Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.
Secular progressive leftists and their eco-alarmist fellow travelers are normally hostile to expressions of Christian faith. But, occasionally, when Pope Francis and his Vatican "experts" come out with a statement seemingly supporting collectivist and eco-alarmist dogma, their natural enemies exploit it to the hilt, as if it came directly from Gaia and/or Marx. The Pope is making a big mistake, much bigger and much farther reaching than the one made by the Pope who condemned Galileo.
... Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change ... is due to land in September to rally climate True Believers ahead of the U.N.’s giant policy shindig in Paris. ... This week’s statement, from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PAS/PASS) ... confirms that Vatican not merely has slim or no grasp of economics or
history, but is on its knees before tried-and-failed collectivist
policies, and committed to a crusade against rich nations. ... The pope, who is an economic ignoramus, has allied himself with forces that would perpetuate poverty, not relieve it.
... Denying humanity the use of still bountiful hydrocarbon energy is thus
not simply wrong. It is immoral – and lethal. This is the real reason
that climate change is a critical moral issue. No one has a right to
tell the world’s poor they cannot use fossil fuels to improve their
lives, or to tell others they must reduce their living standards, based
on speculation and unfounded fears about a man-made climate crisis.
... the serious issue of whether the Pope knows what he’s talking about when it comes to his professed concern for the poor.
The appropriate approach to poverty is not to sanctify it but eradicate it . ... if Pope Francis really is concerned about relieving poverty, his
reflexive anti-capitalist attitudes are pointing precisely in the wrong
direction. Pope John Paul II actually praised the free market as “the most
efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding
to needs.... his successors ... returned to the Church’s more traditional anti-capitalist stance, now
larded with environmental concerns and support for UN-based global
governance. ... Pope Franciscame out of the Vatican gate in March sounding like the theological wing of the Occupy movement ... ... if the poor are truly his priority, then surely what is important is
not “the gap” but the massive reductions in levels of absolute poverty
in recent decades ... one can’t help askingwhether the Pope is more concerned with relieving the poor or bringing down the rich. he exposed his own economic confusion, first in implying that social benefits come only from charitable intention ... and second in peddling the canard that promotion of markets represents some kind of quasi religious faith...
In a far-ranging 50,000 word statement released by Pope Francis on
Tuesday, he illustrated that he is sympathetic to the tenets of
liberation theology and hostile to capitalism.
... Before the advent of liberation theology, Catholicism hated
socialism and communism, regarding them as “godless.” Pope Leo XIII
(1878-1903) wrote an entire encyclical condemning socialism.
But now Pope Francis seems to be embracing a condemnation of capitalism instead, and an embracing of socialistic principles.
Some of the Pope's conservative supporters, like Michael Coren, defend his rhetoric, saying that his critics misunderstand him:
I think Anthony Furey is closer to the truth, but even if you accept Coren's point of view the fact that so many on the loopy left just love what Pope Francis has to say is deeply problematic. He's feeding them ammo.
About that quote from the Pope:
His opinion of capitalism seems clear. But he's dead wrong. Free markets (under the rule of law) actually do "bring about greater justice and inclusiveness". Everyone is free to participate, and if "justice" includes raising 100s of millions of people out of poverty, then the "facts" overwhelmingly favor free markets.
He's full of BS on everything else as well. The "naive trust ... in the goodness of those wielding economic power ..." he says has not benefited some ("the excluded are still waiting").
Capitalism excludes no one. And what are they "waiting" for? The odds are that if they are waiting in poverty it's because they lack freedom and free markets, not because of capitalism. One could just as well point to the Catholic Church, centuries old champion of the poor, as having failed those same supposedly "excluded" people.
... catches the anti-capitalist waves now washing over the globe's political classes.
... sweeping 140-page collection of sound bites and instant quotations that will be used by all and sundry as another authority for condemning free markets, globalization, big business, finance, outsourcing, capitalism, copyright law, greed, climate change, energy consumption, etc.
... In Pope Paul's. encyclical [Paul VI, 1967] written when half the world was under Communist dictatorship, not a word was said of problems with Marxism. Still, Benedict explicitly aims to take up Pope Paul's tedious stereotypical message from Populorum Progressio. ... as foundation for a renewal of the old leftist attacks on business, markets and capitalism.
... 159 [footnotes], but none support the big economic analyses and factual claims that make up most of the encyclical.
... Benedict dashes off .. unsupported statements by the hundreds. ... It dismisses "so-called outsourcing"; ... On the current economic crisis - adopts the idea that Big Government is the answer. ..."The technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption."; "... excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property ..."
... What Benedict's encyclical betrays, most of all, is a willful disregard for economic history and the massive benefits of free markets and globalization.
... After 40 years of dramatic gains in global wealth expansion, after an explosion of living standards and productivity capability around the world, after four decades of free trade and markets that have turned much of the world into bastions of progress, along comes Benedict with a call to turn the clock back.
"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences." -- C. S. Lewis
