David Griffey at Daffey Thoughts caught an interesting statement made to the Pope:
So Mr. DiCaprio, who even caused the liberal PM of Canada, Justin Trudeau, to tell him to tone it down, received a warm welcome from Pope Francis. Now popes greet people. That’s no problem. And I don’t expect Pope Francis to kick Leo in the shin and knock him down over points where they might disagree.
But I found this little snippet interesting, especially in light of Pope Francis’s rather open embrace of the modern MMGW movement:
“As a child I didn’t quite understand what it all meant, but through my child’s eyes it represented a planet, the utopia we had been given, the overpopulation, excesses, and the third panel we see a blackened sky that represents so much to me of what’s going in the environment.” (emphasis mine)
See that? Overpopulation. This has been a pet of the new liberalism for some generations. There are just too damn many [other] people in the world. Now, with MMGW, there is a new reason to whittle down those pesky numbers. Of course the question remains how do we eliminate the numbers? How do we check population growth so it doesn’t do something like bring a civilization and its culture to its knees?
Pope Francis has clearly not accepted that part of the MMGW furor. But in a way that seems to be the modern Catholic approach, he accepts almost every other aspect of it. That seems to be the way the Church is going now. Accept almost every idea and every premise of the new Leftist and secular world view…except where dogma or doctrine can’t be changed.
Go here to read the rest. The Church always gets into trouble when clerics attempt to mix the Faith with ephemeral scientific and political beliefs. The Church and what it teaches are eternal and both mix poorly with passing intellectual, and emotional, fads, passions and fancies.
“There are just too damn many [other] people in the world.”
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That about says it all. For the liberal progressive, he is never a part of the too many people.
The link doesn’t work.
Thanks for catching that Greg. The link has been repaired.
I take it MMGW stands for Man Made Global Warming. Thing is, global warming has been pretty much jettisoned in favor of the more ambiguous Climate Change, which is telling in and of itself. Also telling is that less than 40 years ago, the climoscare du jour was the impending ice age. Now, does not have to be a Climatologist to know that human activity cannot change the earth’s core temperature so radically in so short a time. One just has to,possess a little common sense.
Why am I not shocked about the Pope’s opinions on “overpopulation?”
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DiCaprio could be more Catholic than the Pope. I saw the news video. He kissed the Pope’s ring. When was the last time you saw a layman do that?
Doctrine and dogma cannot be changed, true enough, but like a marriage where the partners are unfaithful to each other, technically it is still a “legal” marriage. That is the mindset that I fear from those that cunningly play the same game within God’s Holy Church.
The other element in all this, is the well-known Pope’s crude statement about “breeding like rabbits.” If the Church adopts even “a sense of overpopulation is morally bad,” then that can only result in meaning that over populating with Catholics is bad. I’m certain that was not Christ’s intention when he assigned His apostles to go forth and teach all nations.
What was the Pope supposed to do?
Scold him?
Tear up the check?
Smile sweetly and ask who he thought was an excess human?
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I’ve had this discussion with my family members and it’s not easy.
For that matter, it could very well be about what his parents taught him– he’s a lot younger than my folks, but mom was taught the whole “we’re all going to die from over population” thing in school, and she was from a Good Catholic Family.
“What was the Pope supposed to do?”
Probably not meet with him at all. Papal meet and greets with celebrities have gone way overboard for quite sometime.
I once chanced on an article by Sir Dugald Baird, written in the early Sixties, when he was the Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Aberdeen. He went on to become the President of the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists
“In India, though Nehru (Times, 11th December 1963) and his Government recognized the dangers of population increase and supported a policy of birth control, in practice in the second five-year plan for India only $10 million was allocated for population control as against $14 million for malaria control, a measure which, by lowering death rates quickly, could further aggravate the population crisis and reduce the standard of living, in that more capital, skills, and experience are absorbed in looking after children and young people and less is available for industrial development.”
Why, I wondered, did a person holding such views not only choose medicine as a profession, but midwifery as his specialty?
Is it only celebrities that are not supposed to meet with the pope?
http://launch.newsinc.com/share.html?trackingGroup=91002&siteSection=latimes_hom_non_sec&videoId=30262660
Looking at his body language here, this *might* just save the guy– and through him, save others.
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Good grief, the Pope says enough stupid stuff that we don’t *need* to hit him for what an actor said he believed when he was a little kid.
Heck, I really don’t like DiCaprio and I think it’s rather decent of him to not just give the Pope a check, but publicly state that it was for charities close to the *Pope’s* heart. Not something like “our shared goals” or similar hollywood junk.
“Is it only celebrities that are not supposed to meet with the pope?”
Idiot celebrities like DiCaprio should certainly be on the exclusion list. Additional candidates for the exclusion list would be Lutheran clerics who take Catholic communion and the heads of regimes who balk at nude statues but cheer on mobs who stone people to death.
How can both DiCaprio and Bergoglio say they are so concerned about anthropogenic global warming caused by the emissions of carbon pollution from the burning of fossil fuel, yet they both willy-nilly jet around the globe on aircraft that consume prodigious amounts of fossil fuel and release vast amounts of carbon pollution into the atmosphere with nary a second thought?
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Let me guess. It’s like tolerance – for me and not for thee. It’s like overpoulation – your existence is overpopulation and mine is not.
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Do these people even consider the consistency of their words versus their actions? If DiCaprio and Bergoglio were really all that concerned about carbon pollution, then they would stop using carbon-based fuels. They would stop jetting, stop driving, stop using electricity. But it is convenience that drives them – convenience for me and not for thee.
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I cannot express sufficiently in words my loathing for these kinds of people.
Idiot celebrities like DiCaprio should certainly be on the exclusion list.
As opposed to all those wise, highly intelligent celebrities that we’re just swimming in, and who appear from nothingness with no effort to lead them to water, just an expectation that they’ll drink?
“As opposed to all those wise, highly intelligent celebrities”
Compare and contrast:
http://www.catholicstand.com/the-pope-the-clown-and-the-cross/
Skelton and his family came to Pope Pius XII out of a desperate need for his spiritual help and in hope of a miracle. Dicaprio came to see the Pope because he believes that Francis is as much of a leftist buffoon as he is.
Environmentalism is a fave project of progressives. They have an ontological commitment to environmentalism, the “threat” of population to the environment scares them into forgetting who the environment is for or what the end game is…,
I don’t care too much about the actor, or the other opinions but the pope’s opinion does matter to all of us.
It is easy to see how some of the sprawling slums of South America could lead a person (future pope) to think maybe Catholics should not take the birth control prohibition to seriously. When the whole world around you is embracing marxism, one could give up on traditional church teaching as transitory, something meant for times now past. I hope our pope will hold on to his faith. We really need to pray for him.
wanted to say
ALTHOUGH They have an ontological commitment to environmentalism, the “threat” of population to the environment scares them into forgetting who the environment is for or what the end game is…,
On July 22, 1957 the Skeltons had a private audience with Pius XII. There was nothing unusual about this. Pius considered it as part of his duties to meet with anyone who wished to see him: rich or poor, Catholic or non-Catholic. These audiences often had a large impact on the people who saw the Pope.
Something to be greatly wished, and which is not argued against in this situation by the current fellow that shared his childhood thoughts, especially not when he looked like a puppy meeting a new favorite person.
Maybe Francis is finally copying somebody that it’s good to copy, even if he has cruddy taste in scientific trust.
I wonder if the Holy Father touched on overpopulation in his meeting with the rather prudish Mr Hassan Rouhani.
Iran has seen its Total Fertility Rate plummet from over 6 per woman in the early 1970’s to just 1.43 today.
As one in eight Iranian women is infected with Chlamydia, this is unlikely to increase any time soon. Estimates suggest that, as a result, about 18% of Iranian women of child-bearing age are infertile
Iran also has the issue with every woman of child bearing age who *can,* leaves.
And those who stay, if they have an internet connection or know someone who does, are able to find out about natural family planning methods.
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There’s a mini-scandal about how hard it is to make official fertility rates in those countries that are measured by asking the man in the street or the gov’t agency that handles foreign aid match up with what any other method shows.
Foxfier wrote, “if they have an internet connection or know someone who does, are able to find out about natural family planning methods.”
Throughout the Islamic world, there is a strong corrolation between female literacy and falling TFR and Iraan has amongst the highest.
Fadela Amara, herself a Muslim, when she was the French Secretary of State for Urban Policies described fundamentalism as something clung to by some women through ignorance and isolation that will vanish when they are given better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences.
“For this generation,” she declared, “the crucial issues are laïcité, gender equality and gender desegregation, based upon living together in harmony throughout the world, and not only in France”
She hailed the insistence of the Jules Ferry laws on making education at every level compulsory, free and lay [obligatoire, gratuit et laïque] .