Does Laudato Si change Church teaching? Does it take sides politically, or encourage honest dialogue? And what essential ingredient is required before the Church will consider endorsing international action in the political, economic, or social sphere? All this and more in this riveting review by Dr. Christopher Manion.
The long awaited encyclical of Pope Francis regarding God, creation, and us, has now been published.
It’s called “Laudato Si,” the opening words of the beautiful prayer of Saint Francis Canticle, “Praise be to you, my Lord.”
The document contains several very spiritual messages – none of them new to the Faith, but welcome nonetheless. These observations appear in various places in the document, and, unlike most papal encyclicals, are not woven together in a doctrinal whole.
It is worth recounting some of them here.
“A spirituality which forgets God as all-powerful and Creator is not acceptable. That is how we end up worshiping earthly powers, or ourselves usurping the place of God, even to the point of claiming an unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot. The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim to absolute dominion over the earth, is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world. Otherwise, human beings will always try to impose their own laws and interests on reality.”
In this single paragraph, Pope Francis makes clear that God, not man, is the ultimate lawgiver. Human beings – and their political institutions – are thus bound by the limits of what Jefferson famously calls “the Laws of Nature an of Nature’s God.”
With this, Pope Francis dismisses and condemns every approach to human life that denies or enslaves the human person. It is a warning to all would be tyrants – think of Hobbes’s Leviathan, or Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984 – you shall not reduce human beings to mere fodder for your political agendas. As Christ told Pontius Pilate: all political power comes from above, and it is limited by the Divine Law and the Natural law, which also come from above.
Of course, for Pope Francis, man, made in the image and likeness of God, is the pinnacle of creation, and his nature was embraced and assumed by the second person of the Trinity, through whom, after all, all things were created.
“By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,” Francis writes, quoting Psalm 33. He continues:
“This tells us that the world came about as the result of a decision, not from chaos or chance, and this exalts it all the more. The creating word expresses a free choice. The universe did not emerge as the result of arbitrary omnipotence, a show of force or a desire for self-assertion. Creation is of the order of love. God’s love is the fundamental moving force in all created things.”
The document contains some very lovely passages on the beauty of the planet, says Father James Schall, the pope’s fellow Jesuit. Francis is a bit of a poet when he describes them, Father Schall remarks.
Pope Francis delivers a profound affirmation of the reality of the creation as a gift of love from our Creator. And didn’t have to create the universe, and when he did, he did it out of love.
Many of today’s natural scientists reject the creator altogether, and thus disallow this most important dimension of creation – its Divine author. The Pope calls such views reductionist – that is, they reduce reality to a manageable little piece of their ideology, amputating the most important aspects of creation and reality itself.
What is left is only a shard, random bits of material reality, severed from both their nature and their purpose.
Francis quotes Pope Benedict, who tells us that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will.”
If we have a nature that we cannot manipulate at will, it is all the more apparent that no budding tyrant can manipulate us either.
One of the most popular forms of such manipulation is unfortunately sponsored financially by both governments and large corporations throughout the world. It’s called population control, and Pope Francis confronts it head on and condemns it soundly.
“Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different,” he writes,
“some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of ‘reproductive health.’ Yet ‘while it is true that an unequal distribution of the population and of available resources creates obstacles to development and a sustainable use of the environment, it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development.’ To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.”
PRI president Steven Mosher has documented case after case of what the Pope calls international pressure to include population control measures in foreign aid programs and the work of nongovernmental organizations in the Third World.
Many of these programs are run by elites who are in control of governments and various well-funded agencies.
Unfortunately, even in the United States, organizations like the Agency for International Development, as well as major foundations and pharmaceutical firms, grimly pursue such policies for both power and profit.
Here, it is useful to mention how Pope Francis resonates Pope Benedict XVI in his desire for what he calls “enforceable international agreements [that] are urgently needed” regarding protection of the environment.
It is important to note that Pope Benedict predicated his desire for international cooperation on a mandatory prerequisite – that such efforts be informed by the truths of the faith.
The late Dr. Charles Rice, professor of law at Notre Dame, addressed this aspect of Caritas in Veritate, the second encyclical of Pope Benedict on Charity:
“It carries forward Benedict’s assertion in his first World Day of Peace message, on January 1, 2006, that ‘Any authentic search for peace must begin with the realization that the problem of truth and untruth is the concern of every man and woman; it is decisive for the peaceful future of our planet.’ His first three encyclicals emphasize that love and acceptance of the truth about man and God offer the only hope for peace. ‘Jesus,’ said Benedict in that message, ‘defined himself as the Truth in person, and …states his complete aversion to “everyone who loves and practices falsehood.”’”
Yes, and there is a lot of falsehood that abounds in the world these days. And Christ and His Church reaffirm their complete aversion to ‘everyone who loves and practices falsehood.’
It behooves us to quote Pope Benedict at length, in order to place Laudato si in its proper context:
“The conviction that man is self-sufficient and can… eliminate… evil… by his own action alone has led him to confuse happiness and salvation with material prosperity and social action…[T]he conviction that the economy – and we might add government – must be autonomous [and] shielded from ‘influences’ of a moral character [has] led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom.” (No. 34).
Integral human development requires more than self-interest. It requires “upright… financiers and politicians whose consciences are… attuned to … the common good.” (No 71).
“The Church… must defend not only earth, water and air as gifts of creation …. She must above all protect mankind from self-destruction…. [T]he decisive issue is the … moral tenor of society. If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society [loses] the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves. The book of nature… takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person…. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice.”
In fact, Pope Benedict repeatedly made clear that the church not only refuses to endorse international institutions for their own sake, but he also expressly prohibited the church, right down to the local diocese, from close cooperation with individuals and entities that oppose church teaching.
This is nothing more than prudence and sober judgment at work, of course – but advocates of secular international organizations and their power – and, of course, their population control programs — would like us to forget, in the words of St. Paul, that without charity – that is, without Christ – such works are no more than a clashing gong or a clanging cymbal.
Pope Francis refers us to Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate repeatedly. Of course, Catholics might already be familiar with its contents, but the secular media and the population controllers ignore it assiduously, and with good reason. Consider this affirmation of life and the family:
“[O]penness to life,” Benedict writes, is “a rich social and economic resource. Populous nations have [emerged] from poverty thanks not least to the size of their population and [their] talents …. [F]ormerly prosperous nations are [in] decline … because of their falling birth rates; this [is] a crucial problem for highly affluent societies. The decline in births… puts a strain on social welfare systems, increases their cost, eats into … financial resources needed for investment, reduces the availability of… labourers, and narrows the ‘brain pool.’ … [S]maller… families run the risk of impoverishing social relations, and failing to ensure … solidarity. These situations are symptomatic of a scant confidence in the future and moral weariness. It is… a social and even economic necessity… to hold up to future generations the beauty of marriage and the family, and the fact that these institutions correspond to the deepest needs and dignity of the person…. States are called to enact policies promoting the centrality and the integrity of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman… and to assume responsibility for its … needs, while respecting its … relational character.”
Thus far Pope Benedict.
Pope Francis tells us that he is directing his comments to the whole world, and he wants to be persuasive, especially to the West, whose economy and political priorities he is criticizing.
Pope Benedict goes straight to the heart of the matter. Europe is literally withering on the vine, led by the same secular elites that want to assume more power internationally in the name of controlling the weather.
“Europe gives the impression of being somewhat elderly and haggard,” Benedict has observed. In part, he implies, that decline is due to an aversion to reproduction. He says that Europe is “now a ‘grandmother’, no longer fertile and vibrant.”
Before you assume any new powers, Benedict tells these secular miscreants, you must cast off this fascination with gender manipulation and perversion, and reaffirm the fundamental realities of the family.
Moreover, instead of trying to limit the population of the poor, at home and abroad, clean up your own act. Cast off your selfish indulgences that you dress up in diplomatic blather. You are already killing your own societies and diminishing your own population. This is a cancer – and you have no right to export it in the name of helping the poor. That is a crass and cruel contradiction.
In coming days, we will see how the secular elites will flock to Francis, while studiously ignoring Pope Benedict.
They will be disappointed. Pope Francis knows that many secular observers will come to his encyclical looking for support for their pantheism or even their outright atheism. Such secular scientists rarely find anything wrong with abortion, even though science tells us that a child’s full identity exists in all its beauty from the moment of conception. So he reminds these reality deniers of another fundamental truth:
“Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?”
In defending human life at all its stages, his holiness also reminds not only Catholics but the world itself of the true meaning of humanity – that is, our human-ness, that which makes us human, and children of God.
“There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself. There can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology. When the human person is considered as simply one being among others, the product of chance or physical determinism, then “our overall sense of responsibility wanes.”
Human beings cannot be expected to feel responsibility for the world unless, at the same time, their unique capacities of knowledge, will, freedom and responsibility are recognized and valued.
Then comes a direct challenge to the atheists who would like to hijack his authority and claim a papal imprimatur for their coarse materialism.
Pope Francis gives a clarion call to all of us to respond to the love of God with our own love and will.
“The Bible teaches that every man and woman is created out of love and made in God’s image and likeness. This shows us the immense dignity of each person, “who is not just something, but someone. He is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons.” Saint John Paul II stated that the special love of the Creator for each human being “confers upon him or her an infinite dignity.”
And then he says to the non-Christian world, to whom he also addresses his remarks, that
“Those who are committed to defending human dignity can find in the Christian faith the deepest reasons for this commitment. How wonderful is the certainty that each human life is not adrift in the midst of hopeless chaos, in a world ruled by pure chance or endlessly recurring cycles! The Creator can say to each one of us: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” (Jer 1:5). We were conceived in the heart of God, and for this reason “each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”
Only the Catholic Church teaches the fullness of the truth of man. Yes, others know it in part, by nature, and by experience. But here Pope Francis invites the entire world to share Christ, who is Truth itself, and is the truth for which all of us hunger, so that we may come to know the love of God, for which we were all created.
These beliefs, however, can never be imposed by force. It is the culture, not politics, that prepares people for social life. Specifically, that means a mother and father and a natural family, into which every child deserves the right to be born. It is there that the child learns the joys of love, as well as the labors of discipline and the dignity of work. When virtues are taught in the home, good citizens and good neighbors emerge, making government intrusion into our freedoms unnecessary.
“The existence of laws and regulations is insufficient in the long run to curb bad conduct,” Pope Francis writes, “even when effective means of enforcement are present. If the laws are to bring about significant, long-lasting effects, the majority of the members of society must be adequately motivated to accept them, and personally transformed to respond.”
And, as a famous Senator once put it, “that door swings both ways.” A responsible government must be responsive, as America’s Founding Fathers put it, to the virtuous citizen. Only when the people are virtuous can the people rule. As soon as they fall into self-indulgent immorality, government will quickly move to fill in the vacuum.
We are fond of quoting Benjamin Rush, who speaks in the biblical manner that Pope Francis employs in his letter:
Consider this citation from a letter of President John Adams to Dr. Benjamin Rush dated April 3, 1807:
The Bible contains the most profound philosophy, the most perfect morality, and the most refined policy, that was ever conceived upon the earth. It is the most Republican book in the world, and therefore I will still revere it. The curses against fornication and adultery, and the prohibition of fornication or libidinous ogle at a woman, I believe to be the only system that did or ever will preserve a Republic in the world.
Pope Francis echoes the sentiment that Doctor Rush and President Adams shared:
“We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it. We have had enough of immorality and the mockery of ethics, goodness, faith and honesty. It is time to acknowledge that lighthearted superficiality has done us no good. When the foundations of social life are corroded, what ensues are battles over conflicting interests, new forms of violence and brutality, and obstacles to the growth of a genuine culture of care for the environment.”
Why Is Laudato Si So Long?
We’re discussing Laudato Si, Pope Francis’s document on God, His creation, creation, and man’s role in protecting and preserving it.
We’ve looked at some of the doctrinal affirmations scattered throughout the document. With these in mind, let’s look at the document as a whole.
It’s 184 printed pages long, and apparently, earlier drafts were even longer.
The length might appear to be somewhat daunting.
It is three times as long as Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s profound defense of the dignity of work.
It’s twice as long as Quadragesimo Anno, the encyclical of Pope Pius XI published forty years later.
It is twice as long as Mater et Magistra, Saint St. John XXIII’s teaching on the church and social progress.
It is five times as long as Humanae Vitae, the fundamental teaching of Blessed Paul VI on human life, love, marriage, and family.
It is half again as long as Centesimus Annus, the sophisticated and profound reflections of St. John Paul II on the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum.
And it is twice as long as Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict’s essential teaching on the role of love in human and divine life.
Incidentally, Deus Caritas Est is the encyclical on which Pope Francis relies for his theology in Laudato Si, although that essential and indispensable teaching has been roundly ignored in the vast majority of commentaries on the encyclical.
Well, why is Laudato Si so long?
Unlike other encyclicals, this document is uneven and somewhat rambling. Those passages we’ve read above already are sprinkled throughout the document, often as a reminder to those enthusiasts of government power who like to use climate change as a crowbar to deprive people, especially the poor, of their dignity and their liberty.
There’s an explanation, and that explanation lies in the ways that documents like this are written in a bureaucratic setting.
Apparently, it was put together in a fashion that is very similar to what in the United States we know as the State of the Union message, delivered by the president every year to the Congress.
The State of the Union address recites a laundry list of goals, arguments, observations, and priorities of the president’s administration for the coming year. It is in preparation for months. And during that period, literally thousands of lobbyists, interest groups, and political players used every avenue available to plead their case for the insertion of their favorite issue into the text.
Suddenly the home telephone numbers of mid-level Senate and White House staffers become commodities. They are traded like stock certificates among lobbyists anxious to satisfy their clients. They can triple their fees if they successfully convince the president’s staff to insert their issue into the president’s speech.
The ultimate decision rests with a handful of senior staffers called “the gatekeepers.” This is the chokepoint through which all aspirants must pass. If your issue is vetoed by the gatekeepers, it won’t get into the speech. This is where the deals are made, and careers for life after the White House are guaranteed.
This might help to explain why State of the Union messages these days are long, disorganized, and usually boring.
Now something similar has been going on in Rome for over a year.
Today we know that countless interest groups have been knocking on the doors of various Vatican dicasteries, bureaus,and offices, attempting to insert their favorite issues and policy priorities into this document. In fact, the process has been somewhat unlovely.
As we will see, the goal of many of the popes advisors was not to encourage a wide spectrum of opinion to inform his goal of dialogue. Rather, in typical political (and admittedly, often, theological) fashion, they sought to exclude views that were contrary to their own – and, as we will also see, many were quite successful in doing so.
Before going there, however, let’s consider the variety of content of an encyclical. Each encyclical is prompted by the pope’s concern for a very real and historical set of circumstances, out of which arise the need for an articulation of church teaching, focusing on those critical problems of the present day.
The essential and magisterial dimension of an encyclical is contained in its articulation and reaffirmation of the timeless teaching of the Church. No Pope has the power to create new truths of the faith. His task, as well as the task of his bishops, priests, and, yes, the laity, is to protect the church and the world from error, and to defend the truths of the faith.
Surrounding this core magisterial doctrine, every Pope will make certain observations and recommendations that are prudential – application of principle to present-day problems. These ruminations on the current scene are in themselves not magisterial. They might be explanatory, provocative, and often inspiring. But they are not magisterial.
For instance, the theology of work and its dignity articulated by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum does not rise or fall with the role that labor unions might play in subsequent history.
St. John Paul’s commentary, Centesiumus Annus, reviewed the principles of Leo’s encyclical 100 years later. But its truths do not depend on the prudential actions taken by individuals during the course of human events during that historic and horrific century.
Blessed Paul VI made several predictions in Humanae Vitae that have turned out to be prophetic. Specifically, he predicted that the widespread use of contraception would result in the objectification of women, the breakdown of marriage, widespread abortion, and, ultimately, the state’s insertion into the private and sacred role of reproduction itself.
His prophecies were profound indeed – but the truth that his encyclical taught – namely, that artificial impediments placed between conjugal relations and conception and birth are objective moral evils – the truth of the encyclical does not depend on how accurate his prophecies were. Rather, the truths reflect his affirmation of church teaching that has existed for millennia.
His predictions were simply the application of natural law, and its concomitant law of cause and effect.
Note, please, that Blessed Paul VI ended his encyclical with a plea to bishops, priests, educators, medical practitioners, and all the laity to defend the truths that he was once more articulating.
As our hierarchy now readily and publicly admits, that did not happen. American bishops literally turned their backs on Humanae Vitae – with the precious few exceptions, and every one of those exceptions suffered greatly for his defense of those vital truths of the faith.
But their silence – for which many have apologized, to be sure – their silence on the magisterial moral truths of Humanae did not dilute those truths, or delete them from the Deposit of Faith. It merely deprived two generations of Catholics of the catechesis on marriage – and Pope Paul’s prophetic predictions came true because the world ignored those truths.
Pope Francis has given this document as given this document a different focus from other encyclicals. He desires that it be read by the whole world, and so his mention of doctrinal truths of the Catholic faith is sparse, and they are not the focus of discussion. He reiterates some of these truths in passing – he condemns abortion and denounces those who advocate population control as a means of saving the earth.
In fact, while he doesn’t dwell on it, population controllers want to eliminate the poor, while Pope Francis wants to help them. That is why popular accounts on the encyclical have focused on the pope’s embrace of the global warming hypothesis, rather than his firm defense of life, especially that of the poor.
But even the Pope’s embrace of the global warming doctrine is tentative. “There are certain environmental issues where it is not easy to achieve a broad consensus, he admits. “Here I would state once more that the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics. But I am concerned to encourage an honest and open debate so that particular interests or ideologies will not prejudice the common good.”
Here is where the lobbyists and the special interests come in. One of the scientists present at the public introduction of the document, a physicist named Hans Schnellenhuber, is an atheist who believes that the so-called holding capacity of the earth is one billion people (as opposed to the 7 billion who live here today).
Dr. Schnellenhuber appeared at the document’s debut because he was a principal advisor in its preparation. That fact should put us on guard, since the passages we have cited reject out of hand his approach to reality – what the in crowd likes to call his methodology of science.
Doctor William Briggs, who studies the philosophy of science, looked more closely at Doctor Schnellenhuber’s approach, and found that he is a pantheist who adheres, not to the notion of a creation bestowed upon us by a loving God, but to something called the Gaia principle, a recent pseudo-scientific new age fad which considers the earth to a living being – and, moreover, since atheism rejects altogether man’s spiritual dimension, the distinction between this earth – life principal and man’s life is merely accidental, and fundamentally materialistic.
And yet, Doctor Schnellenhuber was one of the principal advisors to the Vatican group that put this document together for Pope Francis.
Well, on one hand, that might be considered to be acceptable, since the Pope wanted to consult a broad array of advisors as he considered the various subjects he would address in the document.
Unfortunately, that desire was not fulfilled. That’s because the pope has gatekeepers too, and in the discussions leading up to the document’s publication, they made sure that no critics of the global warming hypothesis were allowed to participate.
The most flagrant example of this pretentious effort to skew that part of the document that addressed questions of physical science was revealed, surprisingly enough, by the Washington Post. There exists no more avid advocate of the liberal, pro-global warming ideology, but the Post felt compelled to brag how its allies in the Vatican had kept any discouraging word from being uttered during the preparation of the document.
Philippe de Larminat, a French scientist, was determined to make clear that science was not unanimous on the issue of global warming.
He had authored a book arguing that solar activity — not greenhouse gases — was driving global warming. “de Larminat sought a spot at a climate summit in April sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Nobel laureates would be there. So would U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs and others calling for dramatic steps to curb carbon emissions,” the Post reports.
Of course, Jeffrey Sachs is a self-promoter who’s been playing the development game for decades. He considers abortion to be an indispensable tool for population control, which is not surprising, given that he is always at the forefront of the international development cash machine.
What is surprising is that Sachs was welcomed at the Vatican Pontifical Academy of the Sciences. The Post continues:
“After securing a high-level meeting at the Vatican, Delarminat was told that, space permitting, he could join. He bought a plane ticket from Paris to Rome. But five days before the April 28 summit, de Larminat said, he received an e-mail saying there was no space left. It came after other scientists — as well as the powerful Vatican bureaucrat in charge of the academy — insisted he had no business being there.
“They did not want to hear an off note,” de Larminat told the Post.
The Post reported that Calvin Beisner, a Protestant theologian and founder of an evangelical group called the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, launched an “open letter” to the Pope, signed by more than 100 scholars and theologians, arguing that climate-change models “provide no rational basis to forecast dangerous human-induced global warming, and therefore no rational basis for efforts to reduce warming by restricting the use of fossil fuels or any other means.”
The Vatican wasn’t interested.
The Post report goes on to recount how, and I quote, “A professed atheist, Schellnhuber nevertheless saw a chance for a massive coup in the climate debate if a sitting pope issued an ode to Earth and the ills of carbon emissions. But not everyone, he said, seemed to want the encyclical to take sides.”
Schellenhuber told the Post that he was stunned to hear that de Larminat, the French doubter, almost made it to the key Vatican climate summit in April. To him, it showed that “even within the Vatican, there were some people who would like to see something that presented both sides,” he told the Post.
So who made sure that both sides would NOT be represented? The Post found out that it was Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He “effectively vetoed de Larminat’s presence,” the Post reports, and continues: “Asked why, Sánchez Sorondo responded in an e-mail, ‘because he’s not an academic authority in this field, neither a religious authority nor a U.N. authority.’”
Now this is getting interesting. The United Nations stands for everything that that Catholic doctrine opposes, and yet his Excellency Bishop Sanchez Sorondo admits that he will consult only with global warming advocates that have been approved by the United Nations. The theologians, apparently, will be screened by the Vatican.
Is Bishop Sánchez Sorondo a masochist? He knows full well that the pro-abortion, pro-population control United Nations attacks the Catholic Church every chance it has. For instance, the so-called United Nations committee on the rights of the child – rights of children safely born and removed from the reach of post-birth abortionists, that is – this committee “slammed” the Catholic Church last year – “slammed” is the term used by CNN – in a report that USA Today called “contemptuous” – condemning the Church’s sex abuse scandals.
Does Bishop Sánchez Sorondo actually think that the United Nations will soften its criticism of the church if he panders to its global warming cadre of government-funded scientists?
Is that why the document doesn’t condemn the atheistic government of Communist China, a government which actually runs the country’s economy and produces more pollution than any other country in the world?
How far will Bishop Sánchez Sorondo go to appease China, one of the most powerful members of the United Nations Security Council?
Steven Mosher was the first scholar to bring to light China’s horrific forced abortion program, which has killed untold hundreds of millions of Chinese babies in the past 35 years.
Why didn’t Bishop Sánchez Sorondo allow that program even to be mentioned as the poster child for Communist China’s force abortion policy? Clearly it is one of the most immoral campaigns of infanticide in history.
Why would he be silent on China, but condemn air conditioning (yes, the document does just that). Is he trying to appease China, and thus the United Nations?
Frankly, appeasement won’t work. Yes, Pope Francis has finally promised to address the problem of bishops who covered up for abusers for years, but the damage has been done: every leftist can now preface his tiresome tirade against the church like criticizing the scandals. Bishop Sánchez Sorondo should not pretend for a moment that stacking his committee with leftists is going to mollify them. It’s just going to make them more hostile, like sharks tasting blood in the water.
Today we will leave the last word to Father George Rutler, pastor of St. Michael’s parish in New York City. Perhaps we should heed:
the counsel of Cardinal Baronius, later quoted by Galileo: the Scriptures teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go….
Saint Peter, from his fishing days, had enough hydrometeorology to know that he could not walk on water. Then the eternal Logos told him to do it, and he did, until he mixed up the sciences of heaven and earth and began to sink. As vicars of that Logos, popes speak infallibly only on faith and morals. They also have the prophetic duty to correct anyone who, for the propagation of their particular interests, imputes virtual infallibility to papal commentary on physical science while ignoring genuinely infallible teaching on contraception, abortion and marriage and the mysteries of the Lord of the Universe. At this moment, we have the paradoxical situation in which an animated, and even frenzied, secular chorus hails papal teaching as infallible, almost as if it could divide the world, provided it does NOT involve faith or morals.
