The new beautiful FrancisLand where everything is equal
At FirstThings R.R. Reno has an unexpected twist on the Pope’s new Global Warming encyclical, ‘Laudato Sii.’ It’s the most anti-modernist papal letter since Piux IX!
Commentators are sure to make the false claim that Pope Francis has aligned the Church with modern science. They’ll say this because he endorses climate change. But that’s a superficial reading of Laudato Si. In this encyclical, Francis expresses strikingly anti-scientific, anti-technological, and anti-progressive sentiments. In fact, this is perhaps the most anti-modern encyclical since the Syllabus of Errors, Pius IX’s haughty 1864 dismissal of the conceits of the modern era.
Haughty?
Francis describes the root of our problem as a failure to affirm God as Creator. Because we do not orient our freedom toward acknowledging God, the Father, we’re drawn into the technological project. We seek to subdue and master the world so that it can serve our needs and desires, thus treating “other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination.” By contrast, if we acknowledge God as Creator, we can receive creation as a gift and see that “the ultimate purpose of other creatures is not found in us.”
In short, without a theocentric orientation, we adopt the anthropocentric presumption that we are at the center of reality. This tempts us to treat nature—and other human beings—as raw material to do with as we wish. For Francis, “a spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable.”
Of course, God is exactly what modernity has forgotten, which means that it too is “not acceptable”—exactly Pius IX’s conclusion. The Syllabus of Errors is exquisitely succinct. Laudato Si is verbose. But in a roundabout way Francis makes his own case against the modern world.
One of the signal achievements of modernity has been the development of a scientific culture. It is now global in scope. In all likelihood it will serve as the unifying worldview that will undergird any future global consensus. At one point Francis calls for “one plan for the whole world.” If this comes to pass, the scientists and technocrats will formulate and administer it. The authoritarian consensus about global warming that actively suppressed dissent, as Climategate revealed, is a case in point.
Although he endorses the consensus view about global warming, in what may be an internal contradiction Francis describes “the scientific and experimental method” itself as part of the problem. It “is already a technique of possession, mastery, and transformation.” There’s not the slightest suggestion in Laudato Si that the modern scientist contemplates or savors the truths of nature. Science disenchants, measures, dissects, and otherwise prepares the world for us to dominate and control.
Technology is even worse. For nearly two hundred years, “progress” in the West has largely mean ever-expanding technological achievement from steam ships to trains to cars to the jet airplane. This has a creation-denying, God-denying logic. Technology seeks “a lordship over all.”
Francis allows that science and technology can lead to useful innovations, crucial medicines, and a kind of beauty in airplanes and skyscrapers. One assumes he endorses the use of technology to meet the challenges of global climate change, uses that will amount to an unprecedented attempt to manage and manipulate the earth’s ecosystem. But it remains dark and destructive. “Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic.”
So runaway Godless science has been destructive. Without God’s guidance it’s become a monster.
Another feature of modernity and its faith in progress has been a political commitment to liberty, equality, and fraternity. To be modern is to believe that, for all our flaws, Western societies are more democratic, more egalitarian, and more inclusive than any in history. This is not the Pope’s view. The West is rapacious. He quotes one source approvingly: “Twenty per cent of the world’s population consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and future generations of what they need to survive.”
In effect, the present world system created by European and North American modernity—the world made possible by Newton, Locke, Rousseau, Ricardo, Kant, Pasteur, Einstein, Keynes, and countless other architects of modern science, economics, and political culture—is an abomination. Francis never quite says that. But this strong judgment is implied in his many fierce denunciations of the current global order. It destroys the environment, oppresses the multitudes, and makes us blind to the beauty of creation.
So in addition to deadly science and technology, freedom has run amok and created a monstrous oligarchy of businessmen who enslave and deprive. They must be reined-in.
I must report an odd, disoriented feeling when I finished reading Laudato Si. Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has adopted a largely affirming attitude toward Western modernity. John Paul II denounced the culture of death and Benedict XVI spoke of the dictatorship of relativism. But in their teaching it was clear that they intended these as necessary criticisms to restore the religious and moral basis for modernity’s positive achievements.
Pope Francis seems to be changing course. Laudato Si does not explain how modern science can recover a sense of humility and wonder, nor does it lay down a natural-law framework for the proper development of technology. There’s no application of Catholic social doctrine to help us think in a disciplined way about how to respond to environmental threats, or how to reform global capitalism. That would have reflected the Gaudium et Spes agenda as carried forward by the last two popes.
Instead, Francis has penned a cri de coeur, a dark reflection on the systemic evils of modernity. Like the prophet Ezekiel, Pope Francis sees perversion and decadence in a global system dominated by those who consume and destroy. The only answer is repentance, “deep change,” and a “bold cultural revolution.”
‘Revolution’ is key to understanding Pope Francis.
If Francis continues in this trajectory, Catholicism will circle back to its older, more adversarial relationship with modernity. In the nineteenth century, the Church regarded modernity’s failure to acknowledge God as damning. It led to usurpations of authority, disrespect for hierarchy, and other signs of anthropocentric self-regard. Francis’s concerns are different. He’s worried about the poor, environmental disasters, and the complacent rich indifferent to both. But his analysis is the same, and he shares a similar dire, global view of modernity as the epitome of godless sin.
Yet modernity has changed, which is why so few readers of Laudato Si will think of Pius IX when they read Francis. Today’s progressives are often critical of the West, and in that sense critical of “progress.” Europeans can be hysterical about genetically modified food. They have renounced nuclear energy, the only feasible large-scale alternative to a hydrocarbon-based energy system. Democracy was the signal political aspiration of modernity, but the EU is a post-national political project, a technocratic, post-democratic project. Here in the United States, many are now educated to believe that the history of the West is one long story of oppression and injustice. Optimism has waned, which means that the pope’s pessimism may be received warmly.
Perhaps, therefore, the most accurate thing to say is that Francis offers a postmodern reading of Gaudium et Spes and Vatican II’s desire to be open to the modern world. He seems to propose to link the Catholic Church with a pessimistic post-humanist Western sentiment rather than the older, confident humanism.
The writer of this piece conflates modernity with modernism. Modernity simply means now. Modernism, as explained by Pope Pius X, places individual experience and sentiment over doctrine. The Church has never had an adversarial relationship with the present, but in his new encyclical, Pope Francis seems to. He wants to erase the foundations of modern life in the hopes that he’ll bring a more just result. But there is no justice in Communism, only thuggish thievery and lies.
Such is the pretense of post-modern and socialist philosophy which dominates our universities and the UN. The pope shares this and believes that the Church can be conformed to assist and supplement the same revolutionary goals. He doesn’t see that Communism and oligarchic ‘capitalism’ are two sides of the same modern coin. Neither resemble the free happy life of Christendom before the Enlightenment, but Communism is clearly worse, though somewhat more ‘equitable,’ if you share that infamous priority.
It’s correct to say that Pope Francis dislikes modernity, because he is a radical. He is keen to tear down the existing social order but, since he has contempt for the natural laws and rights, for freedom and property, he proposes no realistic structure to take it’s place. He is the ‘ideologue’ which he constantly rails against. He is bent only on destruction, in the name of mankind and God of course.
As far as the sentimental Modernist corruption of the Faith which Pope’s Pius IX and X decried, Pope Francis clearly embraces it. In his constant pleas for closeness, tenderness and mercy, his demagoguery about the poor and suffering, and his embrace of all religions and philosophies on behalf of his ’cause;’ he is exactly what we’ve been warned about.
