Vatican Archbishop: Don’t Try Calling Your Climate Denial Catholic Anymore!

by

 

Ready to do or say anything for the UN

Ready to do or say anything for the UN Church

Vatican Radio reports on the “Climate and Health” 68th World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, where Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi c.s., gave an adress.

In his presentation the Claude Rains-ish archbishop discussed the respect and protection of nature, technology, and the role of various nations in health and environmental issues.

It is a great honour to address this distinguished panel and audience on a topic of such urgent importance, not only to the technical and scientific community but to all people now living on our planet and, most especially, to the future generations who will follow in our footsteps.

The moral imperative to respect and protect nature is not a new topic for faith traditions. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures are replete with such exhortations, and most of the major religious traditions offer similar commandments. Man is not the owner of creation but its steward.  In more recent times, the leadership of the Catholic Church has publicly and forcefully expressed concern about the damage to nature being caused by a privileged few, while the health and overall wellbeing of the vast majority of humans is being threatened through no fault of their own. Pope Benedict XVI, expressed such grave concern on this issue that he was popularly labelled as the “green Pope”. Pope Francis continued this tradition and has encouraged a more profound reflection on this global concern. I am sure you are well aware already of the ongoing preparation of a special teaching document on climate justice, about which  United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, said: “I very much look forward to the upcoming encyclical by Pope Francis. It will convey to the world that protecting our environment is an urgent moral imperative and a sacred duty for all people of faith and people of conscience. It is critically important that people and their leaders hear your strong moral voice in the coming months.”

So the ancient scriptures, all the popes including the most recent and credibly Catholic Pope Benedict, and that UN-Vatican farce conference all agree this is urgent, urgent.

These religious leaders and technical experts left no further room for denial under the mistaken guise of so-called religious belief when they declared that human-induced climate change is a scientific reality.  They acknowledged the “very vital role” played by religions through their affirmation of “the inherent dignity of every individual linked to the common good of all humanity” as well as “the beauty, wonder, and inherent goodness of the natural world.”  They proclaimed as “our moral duty to respect rather than ravage the garden that is our home.” They noted the particular vulnerability experienced by poor and excluded people who are menaced by “dire threats from climate disruptions, including the increased frequency of droughts, extreme storms, heat waves, and rising sea levels.”

Don’t dare call your climate-denying a ‘religious belief!’  There’s nothing Catholic about climate skepticism, right Archbishop?

So they had a conference with the UN and a bunch of ‘experts’ and now they know that poor and excluded people are menaced by dire threats?  How can anyone possibly believe this?  What a perfect atheist idea to start calling this bunk ‘faith’ then turning it ‘c’atholic.

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Francis: The Answer to Obama’s Prayers

by
Pope Francis: The Answer to Obama's Prayers

Superhuman Political Force for the Poverty Panel

NBC News reports:

It’s being dubbed “the Francis effect” and it’s hitting Washington, DC.

From 4500 miles away Pope Francis is exerting his influence on everything from foreign policy to summits on poverty. Pope Francis got a big shout out on Tuesday from the leader of the free world as a great example of someone who understands what’s important.”Nobody has shown that better than Pope Francis, who I think has been transformative just through the sincerity and insistence that he’s had that this is vital to who we are,” President Barack Obama said during a panel discussion at Georgetown University.

“And that emphasis I think is why he’s had such incredible appeal, including to young people, all around the world.”

Why does the Francis adulation from Obama go on and on and on? Is the Pope more sincere?  Is he ‘transformative,’ whatever that liberalspeak means?  What does it say when something is ‘vital to who we are?’  Does Pope Francis really have an ‘incredible appeal’ especially including young people, or is it just non-stop well-funded hype?

I know one thing: it’s not filling up Churches, but we don’t need those any more anyway.  You can ‘kneel before the poor’ anywhere, can’t you?

Well, not in Georgetown.

The three day Catholic-Evangelical leadership summit at Georgetown is a direct response to the pope’s call to help the poor.

It’s been answered by an influential lineup of people on vastly different ends of the political spectrum. Speakers include ideological opposites from progressive Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and former conservative presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty to members of Opus Dei, a Roman Catholic lay organization, to Nuns On The Bus, a Catholic groups focused on social justice.

Democrats, dissidents, and a Romney Republican.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a pope have this kind of influence in the United States,” said E.J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist who moderated the poverty panel including President Obama.

…and the whole thing run by a left-wing Wapo pundit.  Does anybody ever help the poor by actually doing something for them?  I’ve never met a poor broke person who would be interested in moderators of ‘poverty panels.’

However, it’s too early to say whether Tuesday’s talk will lead to change.

“If they care about these problems, Americans can change the politics that would, over the next five to 10 years, make a huge difference. And I’m not talking about changing Republican-Democrat. I’m talking about making poverty and the opportunity to escape from poverty a higher issue on both parties’ agendas,” said Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard.

I guess if both parties adopted your big government redistribution platforms it wouldn’t matter if they were Republican or Democrat, you’re right.

The report presents some silly charts showing how beloved and respected Pope Francis is.  Then it talks about how important Catholics in Congress supposedly are.  It all boils down to a sort of superhuman papal political force.

The president said he can’t wait to host the pope and if he can spur the least effective congress in history to action, it might just be a certifiable miracle.

Liberation Theology Has Never Been Catholic, Until Now

by
'Martyred for the Faith' just because he defended the poor and oppressed

‘Martyred for the Faith’ just because he defended the poor and oppressed

John Zmirak responds to the recent revelations by a powerful KGB defector that Liberation Theology, so emulated and resurrected by the Franciscan Pontificate yet suppressed until now, was formulated in Soviet Russia.  After recapping the story and some well-known responses, including John Allen’s accusation that the United States exported forms Protestantism south, he writes:

Whatever problems one might have with Pentecostalism, it is genuinely Christian, which Liberation Theology isn’t. It’s scarcely theology. And it doesn’t liberate. In Latin America, it served or serves as the pious fig-leaf for nasty dictatorships like the Sandinistas’ in Nicaragua, and the Chavistas’ in Venezuela. Its watered-down American version — popular among leftists who still claim to be Catholic — offers political cover for pro-abortion, anti-marriage lawmakers, who hope they can buy back their souls by dispensing some extra food stamps and reducing their carbon footprints.

Much worse than Liberation Theology’s worldly effects are the spiritual poisons it trades in: toxic envy, gut-gnawing resentment, a craving for the chance to mete out violence, a scorn for thrift and honest work and an acid cynicism that reduces every human relationship to a swap of money or power. All this in the name of Jesus.

These old lessons should be well-remembered in our time.

It doesn’t seem that Communism or Liberation Theology have waned today.  Instead they have quickly become so pervasive in the world and in the Church that a free faithful alternative no longer exists with which to compare them.  The Faith is so rare and the propaganda machine is so vast, we are now almost entirely immersed in calculated lies.

Put briefly and starkly, Liberation Theology treats Jesus as a proto-revolutionary who came to save the poor from social injustice. The Kingdom of God is the earthly paradise which we will construct from the ruins of Satanic capitalism. The church serves the role of the Party, as the vanguard of the sacred class chosen by History (oops, I meant to say “Jesus”) to overturn the wicked “structures of sin,” and put the Sermon on the Mount into action at the point of a bayonet. The meek shall inherit the earth, once we’ve rounded up all the non-meek into gulags and confiscated their land. You know, the way the Soviets saved Ukraine from greedy farmers in the 1930s.

It sounds like thinly veiled Marxist theory, and that’s exactly what it is. As Norman Cohn and Eric Voegelin showed, Marx himself seized the Christian vision of a New Jerusalem after the Second Coming, dragged it into politics, and dressed it up in a white lab coat as a “scientific” prediction of a this-worldly utopia. Instead of the Second Coming, he inserted “the Revolution,” and in place of the Christian church he plugged in the proletariat and the Party. For decades, idealists around the world were willing to conspire, betray their country, go to prison, die — and wherever they came to power, to kill their fellow men by the tens of millions, and imprison millions more, to force Marx’s kingdom to come.

Leftism is always relentless, not because it works, but because it’s evil. They never learn or give up.  There is no reason to stop trying and hating when you have an eternity before you.

The sordid failure of materialist Marxism to fulfill any — even one — of its messianic promises posed a problem for people who were still, for their own reasons, drawn to revolutionary fantasies that entailed gaining power, confiscating other people’s property and silencing them by force. History, it is perfectly clear, is not inexorably driven to produce a dictatorship of the proletariat. It took Soviet tanks to remind the workers of Hungary and Poland of what was good for them. It demanded concrete walls and barbed wire to stop the common people from fleeing “people’s” regimes by the millions, to live instead in wicked capitalist lands where they would be exploited. What to do, if you still find reality intolerable, and crave a revolution?

You turn to magic. You create a “god from a machine.” You twist people’s faith in Christ into the self-confidence of a conquering social class. You drag down their hope for heaven, and rope it to wishes for cheaper gas and more cassavas. You teach them that real love, tough love, amounts to a cold-blooded calculation about maximizing utility: To make that liberating omelet, Jesus wants you to crack some heads. Perversely, as Marxism by natural means began to collapse all around the world, liberation theologians tried to revive it by calling it Christian.

Look for this in the Pope’s goals, in his allies, and in his rhetoric.  You won’t have to look hard.