Monday, March 18, AD 2024 11:00pm

PopeWatch: Media Meme

VATICAN-POPE-AUDIENCE

 

 

PopeWatch was amused by this opening breathless paragraph at the leftist website Think Progress:

Pope Francis made the religious case for tackling climate change on Wednesday, calling on his fellow Christians to become “Custodians of Creation” and issuing a dire warning about the potentially catastrophic effects of global climate change.

 

Go here to read the rest.  Had the Pope gone full frontal warmist?  Is green theology to become dogma?  I doubted it and so I went to the source.  Here is what the Pope said in full:

 

 

 

Dear Brothers and Sisters, good day!

 

 
Today I want to highlight another gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of knowledge . When we speak of knowledge, we immediately think of the human capacity to learn more about the reality that surrounds him and to discover the laws that govern nature and the universe. The knowledge that comes from the Holy Spirit, however, is not limited to human knowledge: it is a special gift, which allows us to grasp, through Creation, the greatness and love of God and His profound relationship with every creature.

 
1. When our eyes are enlightened by the Spirit, they open to the contemplation of God in the beauty of nature and the grandeur of the cosmos, and lead us to discover how everything speaks to us of Him and everything speaks to us of His love. All this arouses astonishment and a deep sense of gratitude in us! It is the feeling we experience when we admire a work of art or any marvel that is the result of the genius and creativity of man: before all of this, the Spirit leads us to praise the Lord from the depths of our hearts and recognize, in all that we have and are, a priceless gift from God and a sign of His infinite love for us. 

 

 
2 .The first chapter of Genesis, at the very beginning of the Bible, shows us that God delights of His creation, by repeatedly emphasizing the beauty and goodness of all things. At the end of each day, it is written : “God saw that it was good” ( 1,12.18.21.25 ) …but if God sees that Creation is something good and beautiful, we too must have this attitude, we must see that Creation is something good and beautiful. The gift of knowledge, of this beauty, we have to thank God for having given us this gift, this beauty! This is the path…and when God finished creating man, He didn’t say that “it was good”, He said that it is “very good!”, He draws us close to Him.  And in God’s eyes we are the greatest, the most beautiful, the best things about Creation…”But father the Angels? No the Angels are beneath us! We are more than the Angels! We heard it in the Book of the Psalms! God really loves us! We have to thank him for this!

 

 
The gift of knowledge places us in profound harmony with the Creator and allows us to participate in the brightness of His gaze and His judgment. And it is in this perspective that we can grasp in man and woman the summit of Creation, as the fulfillment of a plan of love that is imprinted in each of us and that makes us recognize each other as brothers and sisters.

 

 
3 . All of this is a source of serenity and peace and renders the Christian a joyful witness of the God, in the wake of St. Francis of Assisi and many saints who were able to sing and praise His love through the contemplation of Creation.

 

 
At the same time, however, the gift of knowledge helps us to avoid falling prey to excessive or incorrect attitudes. The first lies in the risk of considering ourselves masters of Creation. Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will; or, even less, is the property of only a few: Creation is a gift, it is a wonderful gift that God has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude.

 

 
The second incorrect attitude is the temptation to limit ourselves to creatures, as if they can provide the answer to all our expectations. With the gift of knowledge, the Holy Spirit helps us not to give in to all of this…but I would like to return to the first wrong path…Custodians Creation, not Masters of Creation it is a  gift that the Lord has given us, to us! We are Custodians of Creation.  But when we exploit Creation we destroy the sign of God’s love for us, in destroying Creation we are saying to God: “I don’t like it!.  This is not good!” “So what do you like?” “I like myself!” – Here, this is sin! Do you see?  Custody of Creation is custody of God’s gift to us and it is also a way of saying thank you to God.  I am the master of Creation but to carry it forward I will never destroy your gift.  And this should be our attitude towards Creation.  Safeguard Creation.  Because if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us! Never forget this!

 

 
Once I was in the countryside and I heard a saying from a simple person who loved flowers and he nurtured these flowers and he said we must nurture these beautiful things that God has given us. Creation is for us to use well, not exploit to nurture…because do you know father, God always forgives – Yes it is true God always forgives…We men, women, we forgive sometimes – Yes sometimes we forgive, not always …But father Creation never forgives! And if you don’t custody Creation it will never forigive you”.

 
This should give us pause for thought and ask the holy Spirit for the gift of knowledge that Creation is a gift from God, a gift for the best thing He created which is the human person…

 

 
Thank you

This is what caused all the excitement?  Creation is a gift from God and we should use it wisely?  I defy anyone to come up with any pope who ever stood in the shoes of the fisherman who would disagree.  If Pope Benedict had said this, the media would have reacted with a yawn, if the statement had been noticed at all outside of the Vatican and the more obsessive Catholic blogs.  The media meme however is that the Pope is a leftist radical and even this trite sermon on Creation has to be fitted into that meme.

 

 

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Paul W Primavera
Thursday, May 22, AD 2014 6:25am

“Had the Pope gone full frontal warmist?  Is green theology to become dogma?”

I note with irony that those who preach the religion of anthropogenic global warming rarely if ever support the only source of energy that can effectively replace green-house gas emitting fossil fuel: nuclear.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, May 22, AD 2014 6:32am

The road to Hell is paved with good intention. Pope Francis would (unintentionally) condemn billions of the least of His brothers to misery and privation.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, May 22, AD 2014 8:48am

In France, it is very notable that it is the Hard Left that have been most suspicious of the Environmental Movement. Here are two interesting quotations:
“Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag any and all objections to the exorbitant progress of control. Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes, environmental excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological emergency. Everything is permitted to a power structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in well-being.”
And
“There is no “environmental catastrophe.” The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those who live in a neighbourhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop – they don’t have an “environment;” they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places. It’s only us, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hour – the ones who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruit at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on television – only we get to have an environment.”

Mary De Voe
Thursday, May 22, AD 2014 9:31am

Our Creator, God, Himself put Adam, the first man, in charge, in stewardship of creation. Without the acknowledgement of God, the global alarmists are a bunch of plagiarists.

TomD
TomD
Thursday, May 22, AD 2014 12:05pm

Manmade global warming is likely true. It is also irrelevant.

The fact is that even if we stop our CO2 emissions the planet will continue to get warmer due to solar warming. The sun is continually getting warmer and has been for five billion years, thanks to the accumulation of helium in the core resulting from fusion reactions. Come back in a million years or so and it will be measurably warmer. The oceans will be steaming in seventy million. The environmentalist dream of a stable ecosystem is a fantasy.

Up until now the earth’s biosphere has continually modified the atmosphere to maintain the habitability of the planet. We are now at the end of this process. There are no further changes that non-human life can do that will ensure that the planet will remain habitable until its eventual destruction in another five billion years.

It would seem that the only way that life can continue for the long term on earth is for humans to develop and use terraforming technologies that would maintain its current characteristics. It would seem that, instead of being a cancer on the planet (as radical environmentalists claim), we may have arrived just in time to save it. Certainly, if we were to abandon our modern industrial society for a totally ‘green’ lifestyle we would not only doom billions of human lives to misery and death, but we would prevent the development of terraforming and thus doom the very global ecosystem we say we want to save.
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That is quite a paradox, and it makes one wonder if radical environmentalism is another -ism that, like Social Darwinism before the world wars, will lead to great evil if not checked and countered.

slainte
slainte
Thursday, May 22, AD 2014 12:30pm

I am reminded of the Obelisk in the courtyard of the Vatican in Rome and its symbollic reference to the Eqyptian mystery religions and a pagan Generative spirit. Past Popes have caused the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ to be firmly affixed upon the summit of this pagan symbol, thus proclaiming to the world Christ’s victory over paganism and its works.
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The same Christian conquest of paganism is evident in the Pantheon; once a place of worship for Rome’s pagan gods, and now a Catholic Church where Catholics assemble to worship the one true God. The Cross, by the Church, converted that which was pagan to Catholicism by overcoming the powers and principalities of this world.
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So too does Pope Francis reclaim for Christ the proper care and stewardship of Nature so that it may provide for man’s needs as directed by God in Revelation. The Ecological movement does not belong to pagan forces who would immanentize nature and make it a god. Caring for Nature has been proclaimed by Christ’s vicar as a Catholic cause. The Cross has been affixed by Pope Francis atop the Ecological movement.

trackback
Friday, May 23, AD 2014 10:18am

[…] – Sandro Magister Why Israelis Think Pope Francis’s Visit Is Good News – Mdl. Teahan Pope Francis on Global Warming – Don. R. McClarey JD, The Amrcn Cthlc St. John Paul II on Depression – Cristina […]

William P. Walsh
William P. Walsh
Monday, May 26, AD 2014 7:51pm

I can see in the Holy Father’s remarks, an admonition to practice crop rotation and avoid pollution but nothing to buttress the extreme positions of climate alarmists. Some of these would seem to have us repeal the industrial revolution, prior to which the world population was less than one billion. It makes one wonder if some warming alarmists wish to eliminate about six-billion of us. I have yet to hear a good answer to why the Medieval Warming Period was warmer than the recent one, and why is CO2 not more likely a result of a warmer climate than the cause. When one makes beer and wine, CO2 results from fermentation but the process is arrested if the temperature falls too low. CO2 is a fertilizer that spurs plant growth which in turn converts CO2 into O2. Finally, is it not peculiar that solutions proffered to cure anthropogenic global warming invariably lead to a global tyranny?

Mary De Voe
Monday, May 26, AD 2014 9:01pm

William P. Walsh: “Finally, is it not peculiar that solutions proffered to cure anthropogenic global warming invariably lead to a global tyranny? ”
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If, indeed, global warming is a fact, education must induce peoples’ cooperation. Otherwise, tyranny does result. A peoples’ free will in operation will produce more results.
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On a happier note, college students agreed to prohibit the use of H2O to prevent global warming. Not these students, but other college students believed that chocolate milk came from brown cows and electricity came from the wall.
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TomD: “It would seem that, instead of being a cancer on the planet (as radical environmentalists claim), we may have arrived just in time to save it.” Gaia is not going to like that. No more high priestesses calling the human race “parasites” and calling the shots.

Graeme Reid
Graeme Reid
Monday, June 2, AD 2014 8:32pm

Margaret Thatcher, an asset of the Institute of Economic Affairs which is a British Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) globalization think tank – with a global network of professors – and which set up or took over think tanks all over the western world – first offered funding and other rewards to scientists who could ‘somehow’ convince people that human activity causes climate change.
With the cash incentive, the race was on and man made global warming became an industry based on the conjoured up and publicised theories of a minority of scientists in defiance of the views of the majority.
That Global Warming is man made, is easily proved to be the biggest fraud ever, with the elite set to charge globally for carbon dioxide production that people are even manipulated to believe is carbon; eventhough actual carbon is black stuff.
In Australia elite representative, former Prime Minister Gillard, after promising not ‘to not’ introduce a carbon (sic) tax before being elected, was nevertheless obliged to legislate this, and it has imposing about 23 dollars per ton on carbon-dioxide from power stations and industry, and energy users.
Man made global warming was/is pushed in Australia by main media headed by an MPS think tank member; who is also similarly influential in the stock exchange where carbon trading, has been advocated as investment for speculative profit; and it can be used to print money to prop up stockk markets and economies that have been bankrupted from the same elite circles of financers and others who have caused the world’s problems via their deregulation, deindustrialisation, free trade, their control of credit, and other globalization agendas.
But regarding carbon dioxide: Nature produces an immense amount compared to human production; and it is a clear inert harmless gas essential for life and is ‘always a miniscule fraction’ of one percent of the atmosphere.
Also, ‘true’ science has proved that this carbon dioxide percentage increase does not precede global warming cycles but follows warming and therefore has not and does not cause global warming.
So, it was easy for them in Australia to pass their agenda, but their aim is to have their fraudulent but potentially lucratie global carbon trading scheme go global. See the Great Global Warming Swindle film on YouTube.

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