Bill Donohue on Laudato Si: Striking How the Media All Fall in Line

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Pope Francis Fan

Pope Francis Fan?

I hear time and again from non-Catholic friends and family how popular Pope Francis is.  Who cares?

Faithful Catholics spend their whole lives making unpopular choices and catching grief.  Now we’re supposed to celebrate all the singing and creepy dancing over Francis?

At the release of the worldly Global Warming Encyclical, Catholic League’s Bill Donohue writes:

The media are awash with stories on the tension between Catholic GOP presidential candidates and their fidelity to Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment. It is a story worth exploring. But an even juicier story is the decades-long rejection of papal authority by Catholic Democrats in Washington on issues such as abortion.

In recent years, Vice President Joe Biden, House Minority Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, have all gotten into public clashes with their bishop; in some cases as many as 26 bishops have publicly rebuked them. Some of these Democrats were summoned to meet with their bishop—more than once—while others were told to refrain from receiving Communion. Their public support for abortion rights was, in every instance, the issue that provoked the reaction. Yet their dissent, and subsequent reprimands, were never cast by the media as cause for concern.

Catholics are expected to give their assent to papal teachings, but it is not true that all pronouncements are morally equal. In 2004, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) was explicit about this: “Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.”

It goes without saying that climate change is not on the same moral plane with the intentional killing of innocent human beings. It is striking nonetheless to see long-time dissident Catholic journalists—those who rail against Church teachings on sexuality—lining up single file to express their absolute allegiance to what the pope is expected to say tomorrow.

Striking indeed and telling.  Something’s not right, yes?

 

 

Laudato Si: Loving the Poor Like Judas Did

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Love Christ means getting your hands around the entire planet

Loving Christ means getting your hands around the entire planet?

In a few words The Tenth Crusade sums up FrancisChurch at the moment of the Global Warming Encyclical.

Pope Francis blasted Catholics labeling his rhetoric about money ‘communism’. They are only showing concern for the poor – that’s all. It’s unfair to say people who care about the poor are communists.

I guess it’s never occurred to him that people calling what he’s doing communism actually care about and for the poor too–some of them even poor themselves.

Sometimes I get the feeling he thinks before he showed up, nobody cared for the poor.

He must know it isn’t advocacy for the poor that convicts him of socialism, its the specific strategies he suggests. It was his constant shilling for the virtues of dysfunction that leaves one penniless and his incitement of contempt for people who study in school and go to work. The class warfare. His going gaga for Cuban communist dictators and tyrants did not help his reputation. It is his abandonment of moral theology and the distribution of Sanctifying Grace – turning the church into a social service agency.

Christ blasted Judas when he tried to turn our mission into the proprietorship of the poor and warned him that first and foremost is the mission of salvation which we have all yet to see in this papacy.

Just as Pope Francis has contempt for a holy and ancient Mass, Judas hated the way Magdalene poured priceless perfume on Jesus feet.  But she was devoted.  She worshiped Him.  She gave Him what meant the most to Him as God.  She loved Him for who He is.  Can’t these things be good in and of themselves?

Consumed by money, power and jealousy, truly Judas was a ‘social justice’ Catholic.

 

Laudato Si: Is This an Encyclical or Some Sweeping Manifesto?

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Sweeping Condemnation of Industrial Society

Sweeping Condemnation of Industrial Society

You know something’s not right when the AP calls a papal encyclical a ‘sweeping environmental manifesto!’  Isn’t that code for maniacal rant?

In a sweeping environmental manifesto aimed at spurring action, Pope Francis called Thursday for a bold cultural revolution to correct what he said was a “structurally perverse” economic system in which the rich exploited the poor, turning Earth into an “immense pile of filth.”

Is Pope Francis a refined, knowledgeable or spiritual man?  He only strikes me as clever, brutal, and determined.  Do you get the impression that his first version said something like, “a huge pile of s***?”  I’ve read that the pope can be quite vulgar in a closed door meeting.  I don’t know.  I know he didn’t produce this 200-page pile on his own, but I doubt that particular line was anyone else’s.  Either way I resent this characterization of the Earth, and I think you should too.

Where exactly does Pope Francis want the culture to go?  A free market has no structure, only protections for life and property.  To make a new structure or model is really just central planning; adding some new regulations and requirements.  That kind of thing almost never helps.

Francis framed climate change as an urgent moral crisis to address in his eagerly anticipated encyclical, blaming global warming on an unfair, fossil fuel-based industrial model that harms the poor the most.

So the model warms the globe because it’s unfair and it has fossil fuels?  Fossil fuels are just dead.  You can’t really make fuel from things that are alive.  The more dead things are, the more fossil-like.  Even a tree has to grow in some dirt.  You use dead fuel for living things, since they take precedence.

Oil burns cleaner than coal.  Coal burns cleaner than wood.  In Ireland they burn the peat.  Somewhere they cook lizards over dung fires, but something is going to have to burn if you don’t want poverty and starvation.  The world is built for this.  It can support prosperity as well as poverty.

The document released Thursday was a stinging indictment of big business and climate doubters, and aimed to inspire courageous decisions at U.N. climate negotiations this year as well as in domestic politics and everyday life. Citing Scripture and his predecessors, the pope urged people of every faith and even no faith to undergo an awakening to save God’s creation.

Liberals are always courageous.  The more destructive and evil they are the more courageous they feel.  Even Al Gore, Raul Castro, and Elton John are getting heroically Catholic.

“It is not enough to balance, in the medium term, the protection of nature with financial gain, or the preservation of the environment with progress,” the pope wrote. “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster. Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress.”

No more balance!  No more financial gain!  No more progress!  Redefine all your notions!

The world has gone mad, the Church has slipped into the catacombs, and what of Peter?