Why Must Common Sense Come From Outside FrancisChurch?

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What's up with Pope Francis?

What’s up with Pope Francis?

At the Boston Globe there is some rare good sense injected into the frightening Laudato si’ flood of wastewater.

Watch your back, Pope Francis, you have no idea what conniving charlatans thou art lying down with when you go full green.

Your new flock will not settle for being junior partners. Unlike the African missions or the Home for Little Wanderers, they won’t be satisfied with the take from a mere second collection. An inconvenient truth is that greedy greens grab all the gelt.

Remember the Shrine of Solyndra.

These sticky-fingered moonbats even have their own pontiff, Pope Albert I, patron saint of masseuses.

The climate-change grifters are preaching an updated version of that old time religion. It’s still fire and brimstone — a London newspaper headline Friday declared, “Mankind will be extinct in 100 years because of climate change, warns expert.”

There is one major difference between these climate-change “experts” and most of the traditional clergy. The secular prophets of doom really do believe that global warming is destroying the planet, just as 40 years ago they thundered with equal fervor about the global cooling that was leading to a new Ice Age.

It’s still about salvation, saving one’s soul. Repent. Get thee to a recycling center. Separate thy trash. As in any new religion, the greens require devils to keep the credulous faithful in line. Instead of Satan and Lucifer, the fallen angels are now known as the Koch Brothers, and George W. Bush.

Like Thomas Dolby, this new pope appears blinded by science, or should I say “settled science.”

I don’t think the Pope is blinded by science.  I think he’s blinded by vice; the vices of anger, jealousy and pride.  He’s in a maniacal rush to accomplish everything he and his notorious compadres have been grumbling about for the past thirty years.  That’s why he’s in league with Catholic enemies.  As far as the Church goes, our Pope Francis plays to lose.

To stay au courant, Pope Francis this week issued an encyclical, airily denouncing the “harmful habits of consumption.” This goes over big with billionaires who travel in their own private jets.

The pope is particularly appalled by “the increasing use and power of air conditioning,” which you would think theologians would consider a blessing in this age of heat waves. Oddly, though, no mention of the pressing need for more bicycle lanes in Brookline.

The last time the Vatican moved this quickly on a scientific issue was back in 1633, when Galileo was placed under house arrest for life for the “heresy” of suggesting that the Earth revolved around the sun, rather than vice versa.

Now, almost 400 years after that scientific breakthrough, the Vatican serves up this papal hot air.

“Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and in methods of production and consumption …”

After Joe Stalin once read a similarly windy sermon by an earlier pope, he famously asked, “How many divisions does the pope have?”

The question now is, “How many solar panels does the Pope have?” Wind turbines? Priuses?

On the bright side, the Pope says there’s no problem that a new global “authority” couldn’t solve, once we create “one world with a common plan.”

Sounds very feasible. Is Bernard Cardinal Law in the house? The pope is going to need someone to run his New World Order, and the devout Bernie is warming up in the bullpen — tanned, rested and ready to go.

I’m sure Pope Francis is basking in his early rave reviews. Of course his new politically correct friends are ignoring the rest of the encyclical, which is full of what Joe Kennedy II used to call “Catholic mumbo jumbo.”

The media are particularly ecstatic with the thought that his global warming polemics will “make for awkward reading among some Catholic Republicans,” as the Guardian put it.

Apparently the pope’s denunciations of abortion and sex-change operations won’t “make for awkward reading” among Catholic Democrats.

And that is the whole point.  The new bridled faux-catholic press is climbing and slogging through the Pope’s endless manifesto looking for catholic ideas.  Most of these soldiers are in progress.  They say, “I’m halfway, but I have this and this to say.”  But the media machine will simply ignore what they find.

The FrancisChurch agenda grafts leftist statism onto to a shadow Catholicism in order to ride the Church like a horse into the promised land of tyranny.  It’s Liberation Theology for the new millennium: UN climate governance.  The planet is a holy ecosystem and everything is Earth, is weather, is people, is poverty, is faith.  All religions are one in God’s tender mercy, just ask oh Francis, the One.  LoveLikeFrancis.com!

This is the crowning achievement of a consolidated world media: a manufactured cult, and not the Catholic Faith.

After all, Chris Dodd et al. never seem to let the odd divorce or their support for partial-birth abortion stop them from piously taking communion at, say, Ted Kennedy’s funeral.

One thing Pope Francis and the tree huggers can agree on — the need of all the faithful to ride the bus — a bus without AC, needless to say.

“Many specialists,” the encyclical notes, “agree on the need to give priority to public transportation.”

See you at Park Street, Your Holiness!

Somehow Mr. Carr is not the same easy sell you might find say, at the National Catholic Register.

I was disappointed today to see the great and brave Fr. Hunwicke echo the infuriating sentiment of Robert George, by calling for a docile ‘willingness to be taught’ by Francis regardless of what the hell he’s clearly peddling.

I would like to make a preliminary comment. I think it becomes us all to read this Letter intending to be taught by it and by the one who sits in the Chair of Peter and wears the Fisherman’s Ring. It is not infallible, but then, neither am I. We rightly condemn those who rubbished Humanae vitae when it was published; and those who do not accept the binding authority of Ordinatio sacerdotalis. We stand under our own condemnation if we treat this Encyclical with that same disrespect with which the Wolves malevolently treat the Church’s Magisterium. (This is still true, even though it is obvious that this Encyclical does not intend to impose dogma or definitively to settle a particular and precise moral question, as each of those two documents did.)

If we find in this or in any other Encyclical some particular teaching which we genuinely have trouble understanding or appropriating, then, in my view, the most fitting response is simply not to talk about that particular aspect of its teaching until we do find that we can speak positively about it.

I know that Father’s words come with a great deal of Catholic history including numerous papal encyclicals behind them, but really, enough is enough.  Does he see no difference between those who ‘rubbished Humanae Vitae’ and critics of this liberal high tax, big government, pro-poverty, pro-slavery, anti-Church capitulation to evil?

How much Hellish misery, Church dysfunction, and heresy must we endure before we can address the problem?  Docility before error is no virtue.  The problems in the world come from a failure of the Church.  That starts and ends with Peter.  His failure is ours too since we overlook it and we carry it forward.  It’s rooted in faithlessness, I’m sorry, I mean excess pastoralism.

We simply must separate the truth from the lies all the way to the top.  It’s no animus toward the man or the office, just the lies.  It’s love.  The Church’s true problems must be confronted, and gentleness won’t due.

How many more generations must be laid waste?

 

 

 

Time to Turn Off the Francis Show and Stay Faithful

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Don't be fooled into pretending it's real

Don’t be fooled into pretending it’s real

A day ahead of Ramadan, and of the final release of the Global Warming Encyclical, we have to ask, “At what point can we recognize that the things Pope Francis writes and says are not rooted in the Catholic Faith, but are merely blanket politically correct assertions?”  Pope Francis is really more like the “Pope Francis Show” than an actual Pope, isn’t he?

When I was a boy I used to laugh at the character of Archie Bunker.  He was so funny and he was in no way a hero.    Everyone on that show seemed realistic.  They always argued.  They were poor.  All In The Family was the top program for several years.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the point of Archie and Edith wasn’t our entertainment.  That show was created to confuse people.  It’s goal was the transformation of our culture – and it worked.

Much more brilliant than the acting and the punch lines was the creation of the characters.  Most of the thought went into building individuals who were normal, decent, and conservative, yet foolish, selfish, undisciplined, or ignorant.  That’s hard to do.  Archie and Edith were two people who would not actually exist.  That’s the whole point of television really, to create a false world. I no longer find that show very funny.

It’s in the same spirit I believe that the world is now treated to Pope Francis.  There is a lot of thought and preparation behind the character of Francis, and his performance is executed quite well.  The Pope Francis show may seem like a clumsy bull in a china shop but it isn’t slowing, or stopping to regroup.  It doesn’t think small.  It rolls up the whole world in its carpet.

Pope Francis has invited all faithful to welcome the Encyclical on the environment, entitled “Laudato si, on the care of our common home.”

Toward the end of his weekly General Audience in St. Peter’s Square, the Holy Father launched an appeal, saying, “Tomorrow, as you know, the encyclical on the care of the ‘common home’ that is creation will be published. This common ‘home,’” Pope Francis stated,  “is being ruined and therefore hurts everyone, especially the most poor.”

Is the world our common home or our commune?  Is it being ruined?  Where?  It looks beautiful to me, except perhaps on television, in suburbia, in a mall, or in most churches.  I don’t think Pope Francis is talking about ugliness though.  He’s talking about gases and Liberation Theology.

“Therefore, I would like to launch an appeal to responsibility, based on the task which God gave to man in creation: ‘to cultivate and protect’ the ‘garden’ in which humanity has been placed.”

“I invite all to welcome with an an open spirit this document, which places itself in the line of the Church’s social doctrine.”

What is an ‘open spirit?’  Isn’t that something a Christian should avoid?  Perhaps Pope Francis means being open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit?  I think he says that a lot, but I don’t think he means it much.  Pope Francis really just wants us to be open to sets of lies.

How many times lately has the Vatican been forced to tell us this heterodox piece of propaganda is in line with the Church’s social doctrine, and before it’s even formally released?

What is the Church’s social doctrine anyway?  Isn’t it basically drawn from several somewhat conflicting encyclicals of the more recent popes?  Is that dogma?  Inasmuch as any of those letters are inconsistent with the full magisterium of the Church, they must be rejected.  Ignorance of the past is no excuse.

 

If the Left Should Understand ‘Laudato Sii’ is Propaganda, Then So Should the Right

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A certain type of shepherd

A certain type of shepherd

At Catholic Vote Carson Holloway speculates:

I was about to say that people are eagerly anticipating Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, but maybe they are no longer needing to anticipate: According to this news report the encyclical has been leaked to an Italian newspaper.

It is interesting to think about who would leak it and why.  The Vatican condemned the leak and noted that the leaked version is not the final version.  Maybe there are things in the leaked draft that are not going to be in the final version, but that the leaker wants to put “out there,” so to speak, as having the apparent  (although not the genuine, official) support of the pope.  But this is the kind of thing about which somebody on the outside (like most of us) can only speculate.

It is also interesting to see how the news coverage leading up to the encyclical betrays–as usual–considerable misunderstanding of Catholicism by the news media.  There is an article on the Breitbart website that says that the “political left is hoping for a document that ties belief in global warming to a religious obligation.”  To be fair to the political left, the Breitbart article does not name any leftist who has openly expressed this hope.  But even if this is a total misapprehension on Breitbart’s part, it is interesting that the Breitbart writer could make a claim like this.

It isn’t necessary to cite an example of leftist writers hoping for the Pope to tie global warming to a religious obligation.  That is exactly what Laudato Sii is all about, and there isn’t one voice in the mainstream press who doesn’t see it.

Such a claim seems to show a very limited understanding of Catholicism and the nature of the pope’s teaching authority.  The standard formulation holds that the Church has a teaching authority in relation to faith and morals.  But global warming does not pertain to faith or morals.  I don’t mean to say that there are no moral obligations in relation to global warming.  If it is happening, and if it is caused by human beings, and if something can be done to stop it, then there might be a moral obligation to takes steps to stop it.  But only “might,” because such an obligation would depend on the consequences of those steps.

It’s not unfair to expect non-Catholics to assume that the Pope’s words on Global Warming have some moral and religious weight.  That’s because historically his words did.  To most of the post-Christian world the Catholic religion is just years of papolatry, so they are expecting ‘the faithful’ to simply fall in step.

In fact you will be hard-pressed to find even knowledgeable Catholics who would agree that the Pope has zero authority to preach worldwide emergency response to apocalyptic global warming propaganda.   Instead, most writers will fall over themselves to find some justifiable interpretation for the Pope’s outrageous ideas.

The one who really should understand his own moral jurisdiction, and yet does not, is Pope Francis.  Western society is entirely unprepared for such a ruthless, materialistic, and un-Catholic sounding Pope.

Whether global warming is happening or not is an empirical, scientific question, which is not the sort of question over which the pope has the authority to settle.  You would think that the left would appreciate this, since they have complained in other contexts of the Church trying to insert itself into science.

This writer seems to forget that the Leftist machine doesn’t operate on consistent intellectual truths.  It is about power and winning.

I am not, by the way, saying that the pope has no business speaking about global warming (as some Republican politicians have said recently).  If the pope really thinks global warming is happening and is being caused by human beings, and if he really thinks it can be stopped, then he might have an obligation to issue a warning and a call to action.  But this call would not be an act of teaching authority, it seems to me, but a kind of grave pastoral and political advice.  Every Catholic would be bound to listen respectfully to this, but would not, I think, be bound to agree with it.

There are so many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ in this article!

I’ve heard this ‘listen respectfully’ phrase quite a bit these days.  Aren’t we bound to listen to anyone respectfully…unless of course they have left us with little to respect about themselves or their words?

It is hard to see how belief in global warming could be linked to a “religious obligation” in the way the Breitbart article suggests.

Well, that’s the whole point: to make Catholics, of whom the vast majority have been convinced by the media to abandon the teachings of the Faith and line up their souls for Hell, believe yet another lie.  Why should it be so hard this time?  Pope Francis has the entire West behind him.

Heresy drives the Francis pontificate. By their fruits you shall know them.  The question is, how long will we continue to act like these schemes belong to our Faith and our Church?