Vatican converts to UN godlessness
There was no discussion at this week’s Vatican “conference” en route to Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. What’s to discuss? Anybody who disagrees is an apostate, destined for damnation. The important point is to stop them bringing climate hell to earth.
The event — along with an accompanying statement — confirmed that the Vatican has become an arm of the godless United Nations, and an unabashed shill for its murky Sustainable Development Goals.
The encyclical is due to land in September to rally climate True Believers ahead of the U.N.’s giant policy shindig in Paris.
This week’s statement, from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PAS/ PASS), continued the wildly alarmist tone of the longer document they issued last year. It confirms that Vatican not merely has slim or no grasp of economics or history, but is on its knees before tried-and-failed collectivist policies, and committed to a crusade against rich nations.
According to the statement — Climate Change and the Common Good: A Statement Of The Problem And The Demand For Transformative Solutions — ‘The move to a sustainable world will not be cost-free for all: the options we face are not ‘win-win’… We should be prepared to accept a reallocation of the benefits and burdens that accompany humanity’s activities both within nations and between nations.’
And you thought you only had to worry about the depredations of Kathleen Wynne or Thomas Mulcair.
The statement peddles eco-liberation theology based on the tedious demonization of markets and capitalism. It claims that “Market forces alone, bereft of ethical values, cannot solve the intertwined crises of poverty, exclusion, and the environment.” But market forces are never “left alone.” Moreover, history tells us that those countries where market forces are allowed to work under secure rights of property are the ones which tend to be most ethical and charitable.
The statement makes no mention of the terrible earthquake in Nepal and the fact that all the relief funds are coming from the very developed countries that are said to be fecklessly causing climate catastrophe. It is pervaded by the collectivist ethic of the left and its urge to rationalize power under the guise of “Doing Good,” a motive as deep-seatedly corrupt as that of sexual lust lurking behind the mask of religiosity.
Like the document produced by the PAS/PASS last year, this one reads like any UN report, except for the alleged role of religion in creating a new “moral revolution.” It condemns all the old socialist targets of consumption and inequality and “business as usual,” and demonizes fossil fuels, while painting loaves-and-fishes projections of new wonder low-carbon technologies.
The most revolutionary part as far as the Catholic Church is concerned is that it appears to support population control, an obsession of the left which has traditionally not been high on the list of Vatican priorities. But then perhaps that’s meant to come about through more capacity building around the rhythm method.
It calls, again, not for a New Socialist Man but a New Vatican Man whose attitude towards Nature has been “reoriented” in a more collectivist direction. Faith, hope and charity are transformed into ideology, sustainability and forced redistribution. Godliness is now to be replaced by “deep de-carbonization.”
The document deals with the main, and growing, problem of official climate science — the failure of official models to predict the “pause” or “hiatus” of warming over the past eighteen years — by ignoring it. It’s idea of science is to peddle large, scary, perspective-free numbers such as “1000 billion tons of carbon dioxide.”
On the policy front, it claims “Adequate technological solutions and policy options have been clearly prescribed in numerous reports and need no extended repetition here.” Trust us, we’ve got God on our side. Gross Domestic Product inevitably comes in for excommunication. It claims that fossil fuel exploitation has “taken a huge toll on human wellbeing.” Slim mention is made of their enormous benefits.
It peddles the insupportable claim that the world’s poor are somehow that way because capitalist nations have taken more than their “fair share,” but what poor people suffer from is lack of capitalism, not an excess of it. They lack it is because they live under corrupt governments whose leaders, particularly in South America, are likely to sport rosaries.
The statement is at its most posturingly outrageous when it suggest that “we” must give up “the greedy behaviour that was so necessary for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive and instead become truly social beings, living together in comfort and sustainably.”
But it is the statement’s authors who are the heirs of huntergatherer collectivism and subconscious power lust. Advanced capitalism has little or nothing to do with such primitive assumptions,.
Benevolent intention is easy; it is grasping practical knowledge of the positive power of markets that is difficult.
The pope, who is an economic ignoramus, has allied himself with forces that would perpetuate poverty, not relieve it.
He has allowed himself to become a pawn in the great UN-based attempted climate power grab. His Encyclical will doubtless be filled with similar Papal Bull.
Climate Change and the Common Good puts Vatican on its knees before tried-and-failed collectivist policies