Serene Dr. Woo in her Dear Leader suit with very mopey Jesus and Mary in the corner
Dr. Carolyn Woo, former Notre Dame Business School Dean and now head of Federal bureaucratic agency, Catholic Relief Services, was supposed to have been integral to the Pope’s enormous Global Warming Manifesto.
She was present and spoke at it’s unfortunate release.
Pope Francis asks us a very simple question in his encyclical: “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?”
Surely this question resonates with almost everyone. It resonates with me as a mother and as someone who draws on business as a partner to eliminate poverty and as an educator of business practitioners. It is from the perspective of business that I speak today.
Business school academics know all about business, yes? College historians know history, and most economists know how people live and work too.
Pope Francis poses other questions: “What is the purpose of our life in this world? Why are we here? What is the goal of our work and all our efforts?” Those answer are akin to the mission and vision statements businesses formulate to define themselves, to gain legitimacy from society, commitment from employees, and support from customers.
How is it that the Vicar of Christ himself must pose these questions? Are not the answers to these questions the essence of the Christian Faith? According to Dr. Woo, the ‘answers’ are the visions and missions statements that businesses worldwide have yet to create.
So, the most profound truths of our existence will be determined by corporate boards, then screened for compliance with the UN-FrancisChurch officials, I expect. Is this Catholicism or some descending cage?
As businesses strive to find those answers, they should realize that the message of this encyclical to the business world is a profoundly hopeful one. It sees the potential of business as a force for good whose actions can serve to mitigate and stop the cumulative, compounding, catastrophic effects of climate change driven by human actions.
Did you see that? Five ‘C’ words. It’s not science but it’s scary.
One of the principal themes in this encyclical is that all life on this planet is bound together via three fundamental and intertwined relationships: with God, our neighbors and the earth. When one of these relationships is damaged, then the others are, too. So there is a connection between how we treat the planet and how we treat the poor, our neighbors. As Pope Francis puts it, we do not have two separate crises, social and economic, but “one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.”
This contrived trinity of God, earth, and mankind is not some principle. It’s just a trap, a net to bind men so tightly with the Prince of this World that piety and virtue become extinct. High can we fly to Heaven while our planetary rulers move to subjugate us to the Earth?
Don’t let them throw a rope around Christ’s Church and pull it down.