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?