How do I get up out of this?
Who is Maureen Mullarkey and why is she so wonderful? Her piece today on the Pope’s Global Warming Manifesto says everything that no one is permitted to even conceive. Why not? It’s only true.
Subversion of Christianity by the spirit of the age has been a hazard down the centuries. The significance of “Laudato Si” lies beyond its stated concern for the climate. Discount obfuscating religious language. The encyclical lays ground to legitimize global government and makes the church an instrument of propaganda—a herald for the upcoming United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference in Paris.
and then this…
Propelled by the cult of feeling and Golden Age nostalgia—enshrined in the myth of indigenous peoples as peaceable ecologists—that elusive something picked up a tincture of Teilhardian gnosticism as it grew. It bursts on us now as “Laudato Si,” a malignant jumble of dubious science, policy prescriptions, doomsday rhetoric, and what students of Wordsworthian poetics call, in Keats’ derisive phrase, “the egotistical sublime.”
This theme of the Pope’s ego is key. Mullarkey has broached it before, and was entirely renounced by the editor of FirstThings. A more telling indicator of her witness in the age of FrancisMercy you won’t find.
After briskly putting the sinister global warming movement to rest, she writes:
Enter Jorge Bergolio. Informed objection to the pope’s roster of pending disasters is widely available—but also, at this point, moot. Reducing greenhouse gases has just been deemed a religious obligation. What should concern us now is the ecclesial climate that yielded this extravagant rant.
Despite whatever leverage or compromise made up that notorious Abdication Conclave, isn’t Francis the elected man of the cardinals? Such is our infected Church, yes?
There is nothing to admire in its assault on market economies, technological progress, and—worse—on rationality itself. Bergolio, whom we know now as Pope Francis, is a limited man. His grasp of economics is straitjacketed by the Peronist culture in which he was raised. “Laudato Si” descends to garish, left-wing boilerplate. The pope is neither a public intellectual, theologian, nor a man of science. Yet he impersonates all three.
The encyclical tells us much about the man who delivers it. Straightaway, it certifies the depth and span of this pope’s megalomania. A breathtaking strut into absolutism, it is addressed not simply to Catholics but, like the “Communist Manifesto,” to the whole world. Tout le monde.
Mullarkey has all the Pope’s numbers. He’s the Left’s man, the kind of tool Obama would want to head Catholic Charities. He’s clever and he’s going to accomplish what he was appointed to do, but he’s not actually able to be pope. That requires a unique set of skills, among them an informed Faith.
His placement in that supreme seat as an agent of mischief is producing a sort of mania. His job description says to point definitively toward what’s right, but his agenda is to do everything wrong. That would twist anyone’s thinking. I wonder if his mind was always this way.
It’s difficult to find clear simple rationales when you’re bent on so much trouble. Luther was similar.
Bergolio’s resentment of First World prosperity is of a piece with his simplistic understanding of the “financial interests” and “financial resources” he condemns. He nurses a Luddite yen to roll back the Industrial Revolution for a fantasy of pre-industrial harmony between man and a virginal Mother Earth. He demonizes the very means that have raised millions out of poverty, and that remain crucial in continuing to raise standards of living among the poor.
Those aren’t the only good things he demonizes. He also resents and attacks the pious faithful and those who get in his radical way.
Take no comfort from “Laudato Si’s” restatements of the Catholic Church’s traditional positions on the sanctity of life, the primacy of the family, and rejection of abortion. In this context, orthodoxy and pious expression serve a rancid purpose. They are a Trojan horse, a vehicle for insinuating surrender to pseudo-science and the eco-fascism that requires it.
Promiscuous papal embrace of the climate-change narrative includes a chilling call for the creation of global overseers to manage the Progressive dream: abolition of fossil fuels. The twentieth century gave us stark lessons in the applications of compulsory benevolence. The “global regulatory frameworks” the pope hankers for will, without scruple, crush orthodoxy when it suits.
Or might Bergolio welcome that? His appointment of Hans Schellnhuber to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences raises the question. Schellnhuber is a zealous promoter of the theory of man-made climate change and advocate of population control. He has lobbied for an Earth Constitution, a Global Council, and establishment of a Planetary Court, a transnational legal body with enforcement powers on environmental and population issues. In short, Schellnhuber is the Vatican’s advance man for bureaucratic tyranny on a global scale. It is a telling appointment.
A man of counter-faith at the helm of the Church. What could be more destructive?