Enough is Enough
Ice Follies come to Castel Gandolfo
Raising Hope for Climate Justice: AngelusNews
The new pontiff, Leo XIV, has done neither himself nor his office any favour by blessing a block of sea-ice in the name of the poor of the earth. For it is the rich of the earth that the climate crisis phenomenon serves. It is their “justice,” which is no justice, that is being served.
Borrowing from Augustine, while broadening the category of the neighbour, Leo rightly says: “We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures,” whom we can see. But the latter is just what the climate doomsters are doing. Why, when much of the world is waking to this fact, is the pope ignoring it?
When Leo adds, “Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded,” he is again on shaky ground. What is this outlook on creation? Where is the evidence that Jesus cared “for all that is fragile and wounded” in any sense apropos of climate change agendas? Did he express concerns about loss of wetlands or venture opinions about the retreat of the Dead Sea? Did he lament declining fish stocks in Galilee? Did he prophesy a catastrophic rise in global sea levels? He did say something about earthquakes, if memory serves, and about signs in the sun, moon, and stars; but he said nothing about trying to stop them.
On the other hand, Jesus had plenty to say, as did all the prophets before him, about the rapacious rich, as Leo knows. Unfortunately, the clamour about the climate is a product of the rapacious rich. Climate change, despite what they say, is for the most part a natural phenomenon, resting on solar activity and other fluctuations in nature. The appearance of mankind, and changes in human activity, play a very small role on the global scale. Locally, it is true, there are negative consequences when men despise either nature or the neighbour. Greed and profiteering, and the libido dominandi, result in the stripping of soil and the destruction of forests and the pollution of oceans and the herding of men into cities not fit for man or beast.
Climate clamour, unlike climate change, is altogether anthropogenic and altogether artificial. It is a campaign of cruel manipulation. It is the device of some men to frighten other men into submission to abuse, mainly through the bogeyman of rising carbon dioxide levels, to which the campaigners connect every disaster under the sun (including a day of hot sun) and many disasters never seen under the sun. Or never before seen, save perhaps from the walls of a besieged city where engines of war cover the fields as far as the eye can see.
That the surface of the earth, together with the seas, warms and cools periodically is known to all. That we in the industrialized world are responsible for a fatal interruption of that process, for runaway warming that threatens the whole planetary ecosystem, is an invention of schemers in the Club of Rome and in Rockefeller think tanks: the kind who wrote The Limits to Growth, to promote the neo-Malthusian project of saving the planet by reducing the surplus population. These men are wolves in sheep’s clothing, if ever there were such. Why would any pope take up with them, as the late pope did?
Leo’s speech at Castel Gandolfo on the tenth anniversary of Laudato ‘si was mercifully brief. It added nothing of significance to what Francis said in that and other documents. It did, however, include reference to his predecessor’s unhappiness with those who deride or ridicule the settled science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). It made clear that Leo shares that unhappiness. Recent assaults by the Trump administration on the AGW construct and on its associated political and economic agendas were doubtless fresh in his mind. But it was not the Trump administration, for all its own dubious agendas, that invented the objections to this oxymoronic “settled” science. Serious scientists have and do object to almost every part of the AGW narrative, particularly the part that pins climate change on CO2 production. CO2 production, they point out, does not cause warming but accompanies warming, contributing to the greening of the planet. Moreover, once a certain saturation level is reached, it ceases to be much of a factor at all.
Perhaps Leo hasn’t considered these things. Perhaps he leaves debate about them to Francis’s friends at the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, which began partnering with the Vatican shortly after Laudato si’. It was in 2019, just as their Great Reset – that is, their great transfer of wealth and political power from the middle and lower classes to themselves – was gathering steam under cover of that other man-made crisis, COVID and the COVID countermeasures, that this partnership was formalized. But whether Leo grasps these things or not, whether he is or isn’t conscious of the fact that his own rhetoric (though relatively restrained) sounds remarkably like that of the rich of the earth, who everywhere promote and pay for its infinite repetition, he has no proper business pontificating about matters scientific or chiding those with whom he disagrees. And why do I say that? I say it precisely because he is the pontiff.
It belongs to the successor of Peter to guide the faithful as they proclaim good news to the poor of the earth. It belongs to him to announce that the earth itself belongs to God and that God intends it, pro tempore, as a home for all and a habitat in which they can praise their Creator for his good gifts. It belongs to him to say that man was put here to care for creation with a care that begins in grateful praise to the one true God, not in Gaian mysticism or flat-earth secularism. It belongs to him to say that the earth itself is not divine but creaturely; that it is not, as we know it, a permanent but a provisional gift, one that east of Eden has always known climate change and, while it lasts, always will; that God himself will burn it to cinders with flaming fire and make it anew, as a habitation fit for those (and only those) who love God. It belongs to the successor of Peter to rebuke the Gaia worshipers and the neo-Malthusian haters of the human race. It does not belong to him to pronounce on climate science, even by implication, any more than it belongs to him to pronounce on astronomical science.
Leo, I’m sure, knows that Galileo was condemned for pontificating about scripture, in breach of his agreement to cease doing so, rather than for his heliocentrism, on which the Church was careful not to pronounce judgment. Has he forgotten that the Church – though its creatio ex nihilo dogma played an indispensable role in the rise of modern science, and though it has a sacred responsibility to defend man from the pseudo-science of the godless wherever it belittles man, and from the siege of man by the armies of the transhumanist “tech bros” with which Trump and other world leaders happily consort – has no mandate to determine scientific or technological questions or to rest its own preaching and example on proffered answers to those questions?
The ice follies at Castel Gandolfo would not have embarrassed Francis. They would have embarrassed Urban VIII, and with good reason. Not because of their sheer hokeyness, what with red hats waving blue banners to simplistic strains of Laudato si’, all in front of that piece of sea ice shipped in at great expense, no doubt, and looking like something out of a Cybele cult. But rather because Urban knew that the scientist ought not undertake the work of the magisterium – not, at all events, on the grounds of his science – and that the magisterium ought not undertake the work of the scientist, or assume that this or that group of scientists has things right. Especially in an era, and in a field, in which “The Science” has been trademarked and sold to the highest bidder.
I have had, I confess, a bit of fun with this subject in the past, promoting BGW in place of AGW. But I find it difficult to laugh with those who are laughing at this latest folly. It’s not at all funny when the Bishop of Rome sounds like a somewhat more cautious John Kerry, who might not have approved a further diminishment of Arctic sea ice by exporting a piece of it to Castel Gandolfo. We had a dozen years of this routine under Francis, and it’s wearing very thin indeed, thinner than the ice in Greenland. Why didn’t they think, at least, to fly up a block from the Antarctic, where sea ice has been growing, scoring one for the Global South?
Please, Your Holiness, enough is enough! Leave such religious “ice capades” to the new Archflaminica of Canterbury, as some wag has dubbed her, and to the dying communities of episcopalian boomers. The office you occupy is not that of scientist-in-chief or economist-in-chief or environmentalist-in-chief or propagandist-for-global-governance-in-chief. Nothing a pontiff ventures on such matters is said with the authority of his office. It is mere personal opinion, whether well informed or poorly informed. A good deal of what was said by your predecessor was poorly informed and, because it dressed private opinion in the dignity of the office, it was a betrayal of that office. I urge you, as many are urging you, not to follow his example. Rid yourself of those wealthy technocrats who have penetrated the Vatican bureaucracy and the Grima Wormtongues who whisper in your ear on their behalf. Look to the theological rock from which you were hewn. Look to Peter himself. Look to Augustine. Look to the Leonine, not to the anodyne or the asinine by which holy St Francis, at once tender and sharp as a tack, has today been besmirched.
To my reader, I say, because I know I have readers who are confused about such things and I do not wish to confuse them further: Do not mistake my boldness for disrespect. Every pope is a partner in the stewardship of Peter to Christ the King, and must be honoured as such, even bad popes, of which history affords many examples. Every worthy pope is, as I believe Leo XIV is and means to be, a pillar of support to other bishops in the conduct of the mission of Christ. He is an ambassador for Christ, indeed ambassador-in-chief, and just so servus servorum Dei. He is a man charged with proclaiming and expounding the gospel of Christ, and with maintaining the Church in the discipline demanded by that gospel.
A pope may fight vigorously against heresy and heterodoxy, against corruption and abuse. He may put a protective hand over the smouldering wick and fan the flames of faltering faith. He may (though this belongs more to the prophet than to the pope) rebuke the rapacious, especially those who rob the poor, the hungry, the weary of the land, of the sustenance they require or the liberty and dignity they desire. He may denounce those who despise God’s creatures, beginning with those who despise the creature made in the image of God. He may laud science and even be a sort of scientist, like Gilbert (Sylvester II) or Grosseteste. But he may not determine Church doctrine or ethics on the basis of speculation about the role of CO2 in the atmosphere or on what he thinks he knows about cycles of growth and decline in sea ice. Certainly he must never ally himself with those who threaten us with hell on earth, or pretend to save us from it, while conveniently overlooking the hell under the earth. Whatever is to be said of the previous pope in that regard, I am not saying it of the present one. I am only begging him, as I am praying for him, to help turn the Church from that path and to strengthen the things that remain.
On this Solemnity of St Francis, the OT lection is from Sirach 50. I will quote it here in part, albeit without commentary, which should not be necessary: "The leader of his brethren and the pride of his people was Simon the high priest, son of Onias, who in his life repaired the house, and in his time fortified the temple. In his days a cistern for water was quarried out, a reservoir like the sea in circumference. He considered how to save his people from ruin, and fortified the city to withstand a siege."
Thank you, Dr. Farrow, for this excellent article which brings sanity to the insanity.
I wonder how much it cost to bring the block of ice from Greenland to Italy, and how much fuel was used in order to do that?