Conservative Catholic bishops flirt with climate denial at odds with Pope Francis

Right-wing members of the Red Hat Clan and their fans of the conservative Catholic press were a little moved when the president told reporters that Papa Francesco had called him a “good Catholic” and that he would continue to receive the ‘Eucharist. with a clear conscience. Personally, I thought it was a bit of a blunder to share a private conversation with the Pope with the world. (Remember when John Paul II had a private viewing of Mel Gibson’s sacred little snuff movie, and curators bragged that JPII had said how much he liked the movie? It was pretty classless.) But, to be fair, Biden’s remarks have gotten around the corner, so there you go.

What is more concerning is that once Biden left Rome for the climate summit in Scotland, a strong tension of pure climate denial manifested itself among the same conservative Catholic circles who had expressed their disappointment at the to the remarks of Papa Francesco on the faith of the president. This has the potential to cause far more serious damage in the long run than what the Pope told the President. Papa Francesco has been one of the clear and clear voices calling for radical action to tackle the climate crisis. His case is based both on a Christian call for environmental stewardship and on the disproportionate effect the climate crisis is already having on the world’s poor. In a 2015 encyclical, the Pope called for what he called “integral ecology”. This call has gone remarkably unnoticed in the American Church. Of National Catholic journalist:

Overall, American Catholic bishops have been overwhelmingly silent on climate change. Of the 12,077 columns we studied, only 93 (0.8%) mention climate change, global warming or their equivalent. These 93 columns come from just 53 of the 201 bishops in our dataset. The other 148 (74%) never mentioned climate change in their columns.

Second, when the bishops mentioned climate change, they moved away from the Church’s teaching on this issue: 44 of the 93 columns (47%) that mention climate change do not refer to the teaching of the Church. ‘Church on the matter. Of the 49 columns that do, many fail to substantively communicate the content of the church’s teaching on climate change. In six columns, the bishop downplayed the Pope’s authority to teach climate change. In nine columns, the bishop downplayed the focus on climate change in the church’s broader ecological teachings. In addition, 29 columns do not clearly express the bishop’s personal perspective on teaching. Since silence can be a form of climate change denial, readers might interpret their bishop’s silence as disagreement – and license to dissent.

And there is also a feeling abroad in conservative circles that behind all this worry about the Earth turning into uninhabitable ash lies an atheistic, pantheistic desire that we all return to worshiping trees or something like that. Here is Father Paul Haffner in the Catholic National Register:

So, the UN point of view, we know, is obtained by a rather fragile consensus, while our Christian point of view, Eastern and Western, is obtained by the Apocalypse. So these are two different images. Climate change is something not all scientists agree on anyway. There are people, for example, who would say that climate change has always happened because the climate is never exactly the same, but the Church adheres to a particular vision of climate change, adopted by the UN, and several world governments around the world, is a bit dangerous. Like the Galileo affair – you buy a position and science can take you on the wrong foot. So we have to navigate very, very carefully through these troubled waters.

Either way, I don’t think the climate crisis will be dismissed as completely as the concept of an Earth-centered solar system, but keep going. It is time to make a case for faith-based batshittery.

It’s a new age religion, basically a cosmo-centrism in which the cosmos is placed in the center, the human being is a nuisance, and you want to put it aside. Therefore, abortion, euthanasia and depopulation of course, are all part of this wicked agenda, which obviously wants the person to be put second and third and the exaltation of animals, putting them on the same level as the animals. Human being. The biblical and traditional teaching is that men and women are at the top of the created world. The hierarchy in creation exists and we forget it because what is promoted is fundamentally ecologism, as we call it – a socialist or communist ideology that wants to level everything and forget that there is a hierarchy. in which the human person is the summit, under God, under Christ, with dominion over creation.

These are the kinds of weird word collisions you get in a lot of hardline Catholic intellectual begging. Is environmentalism socialist and communist? The “exaltation of animals”. I don’t know if Father Haffner is aware of this, but if the climate crisis is not resolved his work at the Gregorian Institute in Rome is going to be lost because the Gregorian Institute will be underwater in the Mediterranean Sea. , and the Mediterranean Sea will not care about Father Haffner’s biblical correction.

The Church… says that we must take care of creation as “priests” and stewards and leaves it to our initiative. We do not give too many details and this is the genius of the oriental tradition. Then we will not be caught by these socialist and communist pressure groups and ideologies. We also remember that we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. This creation will not last forever. We don’t have a permanent home in this current world, so to try to deify or make this world permanent as if it’s something we have to preserve forever is actually worshiping it. We worship a false God.

I am sure it will bring great comfort to the millions of drought-hungry and thirsty people, or to the people of the South Pacific whose countries are beginning to sink forever under the waves. There is absolutely nothing remote “Christian” in this view. I wish Father Haffner the best of luck with his swimming lessons.

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