UN’s Jeffrey Sachs: Lord of the FrancisGospel?

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The Catholic Church's New Governing Board

The Catholic Church’s New Governing Board

At the National Post Fr. Raymond J. d’ Souza tracks the evolution and power of worldwide global warming apostle and now Vatican guide, UN’s Jeffrey Sachs.

Jeffrey Sachs, it is true, is just one man. But the UN’s chief development man is near-ubiquitous, laying out the future of the global economy. If you want to know what the conferenciers of global summitry discuss, read Sachs.

Here in Poland, his name is most associated with the “shock therapy” of early 1990s. After the defeat of communism and return to democratic politics, Poland had to decide how to dismantle the state-controlled economic policies that had kept Poland poor for four decades. Sachs was the principal international advisor advocating a rapid removal of price regulations and state subsidies. There would be sharp short term pain for, it was hoped, economic freedom, stability and growth in a short few years.

Poland opted for shock therapy and within three years the economy was growing, hyperinflation had been killed and the Polish entrepreneurial class, everywhere evident today, had emerged. Compared to more sluggish transitions elsewhere in the former Soviet empire, Polish shock therapy was judged a success.

The Sachs of the 1990s, flitting hither and yon to advocate rapid adoption of free-market policies was considered a man of the right. Yet for 20 years now he has been flitting ever-farther afield in the service of poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Special advisor to the UN for the millennium development goals, he is now leading the UN charge toward a global climate change treaty. In terms of impact on global policy priorities, there are as few as influential as Jeffrey Sachs.

“Leading the UN charge toward a global climate change treaty.”

On balance, his poverty work has been rooted in confidence that human capital — unleashing the creative productivity of the poor through education, access to capital and economic freedom — is the foundation for economic growth. That’s to his credit, even if he also keeps faith with the global poverty and aid industry that has long believed that the quickest way to reduce poverty is to get rid of poor people, whether by contraception and sterilization campaigns, eugenics, expanded abortion licences and, in the case of China, systematic human rights violations in enforcing the one-child policy.

Sachs bears watching, and I assign his work in my own economics course, for he is always leading the trends. In the Nineties it was post-communist transition. In the Aughts it was poverty. Now it is global warming and sustainable development. Last week, he was in Quito for the “International Conference on Sustainable Development.” I first thought he might be on hand to greet Pope Francis, but it turned out he left Quito before the pope arrived. Sachs does not need to ambush the Holy Father abroad. Francis invited him to the Vatican in April to headline the Church’s own seminar on climate change.

Nevertheless, Sachs was in tiny Ecuador while Francis was also there.  Now he’s back in the Vatican next week.

It’s getting hard to keep up with all the speeches, seminars and summits. While the “International Conference on Sustainable Development” in Ecuador was wrapping up, there was a contemporaneous “World Summit on Climate and Territories” in Lyon, both of which preceded last week’s “Climate Summit of the Americas” in Toronto. All of which is gearing up for the climate change summit in Paris this December.

“Kathleen Wynne has this week been hosting a climate summit with California’s governor Jerry Brown and Al Gore, both high cardinals in the zealous Church of Global Warming (Mr. Gore used to be Pope of that church, but the real Pope is now its Pope too), bringing a wonderful touch of pure Americana into Ontario politics,” wrote Rex Murphy on Saturday in our pages.

The Pope is now the Pope of Global Warming.  No more need for Al.

But it is not just America, nor just Ontario. It is almost everywhere, like Sachs himself. China recently moved toward a climate alliance with the United States, and the G7 declared that in about a hundred years they would no longer use fossil fuels. Indeed, one of the few places where climate enthusiasm is muted is the former Soviet empire; memories here of state-directed economic goals are relatively fresh and not favourable.

Though continuously associated with lawless communism, Putin’s Russia is one of the few places in the modern world that seems to reject it today.  They embrace Christianity without trying to crush or neuter it.

Father has the trends down.  As Sachs moved from Right to Left so did the world around him.

Sachs’ views prevailed in Poland 25 years ago. With the next round of the UN “sustainable development goals” — the updating of the millennium development goals — and the Paris summit, Sachs is prevailing the world over.

I rather doubt that Pope Francis would think it a step up to go from being the successor of St. Peter to the successor of Al Gore, but much of the world sure thinks it fabulous. After all, St. Peter never got the Nobel Peace Prize. And today while few of the global policy elite read the epistles of Peter, many fervently follow the gospel of Sachs.

Seeing Jeffrey Sachs so active and embraced in the Vatican today, one gets the sense that there is a plan afoot that has nothing to do with the Church’s mission or the papal office, yet demands the full compliance and surrender of both.

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?

 

 

 

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

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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.