Pope Francis leaves Heartland’s climate science team out in the cold
In the quest for social justice, the Vatican is supporting scientific injustice.
The last time we checked in with Pope Francis, he was preparing an encyclical addressing “the moral cause of climate change.”
A group from the Heartland Institute, which promotes free-market solutions to social and economic problems, was on its way to Rome to present data that would give the pontiff a more science-based perspective than the faith-based theories of climate change activists.
Sadly, the team did not obtain an audience with the Pope. However, they did hold a “Environmental Workshop” in an attempt to formally present information to the public in hopes that it will eventually been seen by the Holy Father.
There were many wonderful talks, but perhaps the most poignant was given by Christopher Monckton, British peer and chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI).
One speaker, comparing the subject to the 17th century trial by the church of Galileo Galilei, said the pope would demean his office if he put his moral authority behind those fighting climate change.
“You demean the office that you hold and you demean the church whom it is your sworn duty to protect and defend and advance,” British peer Christopher Monckton warned, speaking at the event as if he were talking to Francis directly.
Then, saying that efforts to curtail carbon emissions would most directly affect the poor, Monckton imagined telling the pope: “You will be kicking the poor in the teeth. Stand back and listen to both sides. And do not take sides in politics.”
…Monckton, who was an advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, started his address by quoting from the Bible at length in Latin, specifically a passage where Jesus tells Pontius Pilate he has come to “bear witness to the truth.”
“It is not the business of the church to stray from the field of faith and morals and wander into the playground that is science,” Monckton said.
How warmly was the information presented in this workshop received by papal officials? The phrase “deep freeze” comes to mind:
Pope Francis’ closest cardinal advisor on Tuesday blasted “movements in the United States” hostile to the pontiff’s forthcoming document on the environment, claiming the criticism is fueled by a form of capitalism protecting its own interests.
“The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits,” said Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga.
Rodríguez is the coordinator of a group of nine cardinals that serves as Pope Francis’ informal cabinet.
In the quest for social justice, the Vatican is supporting scientific injustice.
As a businesswoman whose free-market career is based on companies hiring me to help them protect the environment and their workers, I assert that Cardinal Maradiaga’s heart and head have been hardened. His statements are undeserved smears against millions of Catholic business owners who are proactive about health and safety, like my clients, as well as needlessly insulting to the team of dedicated, impartial, and motivated scientists who came to Rome in good faith.
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Last time I was in Rome it took me three days to just do a walk through of the Vatican art treasures. If the Pope really wants to help the poor he could hold the worlds greatest garage sale and donate all that money to little parishes with poor priests and nuns who are really doing the Lords work.
Perhaps. But with a multi-trillion dollar welfare economy, multi-trillion dollar deficits, and over one million aborted [wholly innocent] human lives annually, there are still indigent, homeless, and even unidentified Americans.
I am by no means a religious person, but from my boyhood days I seem to remember from the bible this saying: “The poor will always be with you”. There were poor then, and there are poor now, and there will be poor 1,000 years from now. I for one don’t see anything on the horizon to stop it. If anything, poverty is increasing.
Material “equality” will never exist. Even in a genuine “socialist utopia” there will always be some (and it may be through not fault of their own*) who fall upon hard times.
The mission for the faithful is not to eradicate the poor (or poorness or poverty), but to serve (feed, clothe, shelter, and generally care for) the poor.
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*illness, misfortune, natural disasters, mistakes or casual carelessness of themselves, or the mistakes, carelessness, or misdeeds of others (misdeeds includes everything ranging from petty crime to socialist greed).
The Vatican and left-wing ideologues have reached a consensus that the Earth is flat and humans are the product of spontaneous conception. Well, perhaps not the Vatican. At least not the latter. But it does share a common penchant for liberal (i.e. unprincipled) change and progressive (i.e. monotone increasing) authority. It’s telling that leftists are more likely to support individual charity when it is prosecuted through redistributive change.
At what point does this church lose its tax exempt status if it continually voices opinions on political issues?
Since when are tax exempt organisations not supposed to have or express political opinions? Where did you get that idea?
The church will never lose its tax exempt status as long as it follows the left line.
Wrong. It’s got nothing to do with right or left. There is no bar on tax exempt organisations expressing political opinions. Right To Life and Greenpeace are both tax exempt, as are the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and the ACLU.
REALLY want to like this guy, but he just won’t let me.
He gets further and further from it.
BTW, there’s good evidence that the KGB invented “liberation theology”. Look over at PJ Media.
Pope Francis and his closeted cabal of Cardinals should not be dismissive of any scientific evidence which correlates directly with real downside societal implications. Nothing happens in isolation not even in Cardinal Land. If nothing else, Francis’ spiritual ears should have immediately perked up!
Sadly his ears are plugged by ear wax manufactured by the bee-hive collective. More likely, though, Francis appears to be tuned in to the populist politics wavelength.
For him to say that capitalism is the problem tells me that he does not understand the Bible or what Jesus taught. He should read the parable of the ten talents-the master invests and expects a return. And, “to whom much is given much is required.”
Capitalism helps people flourish and then those flourishing people help other people to flourish. How does he think the Vatican stays in business? Or, Samaritan’s Purse, for that matter? The donations are not from the Mafia are they? Why can’t he make this connection? Maybe he should do the bookkeeping and not the soul keeping.
Francis and his crew should meet with the Rev. Father Sicirco of the Acton Institute-ASAP, before he does any more brain damage to the church.
http://kingdomventurers.com/2015/04/12/humanity-thrives-on-moral-guided-free-market-economics-and-acts-of-creation-2/
http://www.acton.org/
At the very least the dogmatic ‘scholars’ should sit down and listen to what Heartland has to say.
How can this papacy be trustworthy on any position if it doesn’t reflect on all the information of this matter and the vast repercussions tied to it?
This pope WILL listen to and wants to redeem the infamous dehumanizing Marxist Castro Brothers but he won’t listen to Heartland? Maybe there is some Hillary type dough-nating going on that we don’t know about. Perhaps Francis wants to have a legacy of Popular Popery like Obama the Just (in his own mind).
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“It is not the business of the church to stray from the field of faith and morals and wander into the playground that is science,” Monckton said.
Monckton is wrong in saying this. The Kingdom of God’s church is based on empirical-historical evidence-the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It IS the churches’ business as a part of the Kingdom of God to be involved in all that God created and that includes all science fields: natural, chemical, bio-chemical, environmental, material, classical and quantum physics, astronomy… The church is NOT limited to speak only about morals and pieties. And, it is never to speak the pandering ‘niceties’ that the liberal churches dish out.
The universe is too grand and too wonderful for tiny mindless preaching to be taking place.
Earlier post reflection: maybe Millennials are leaving churches because those who have been given so much have not done what is required of them-to research and seek the absolute Truth, both material and form, and present this Truth to them in a compelling way. Francis is setting a bad example for them in this present matter.
I would love to hear a sermon about theistic evolution and another about classical physics and another about quantum physics. I want to hear one about optics and about light as both particle and wave. Jesus said, “I am Light of the world. He that follows me will not walk in darkness.” Many are walking in utter darkness today.
God’s wonderful creativeness is apparent in and throttled by the extremely fine tuning of the vast universe. God’s Creation handiwork speaks for Him and he is not silent. Kingdom Dwellers should not be silent either.
The fact/value split that Monckton is clearly pronouncing is pervasive throughout modern philosophy, science, many religions and even Christianity. This worldview has its roots in the teachings of ancient Greek philosophers Epicurus (341-270 BCE) and Democritus’s dictum of “atomism”, a dictum where reality was reduced to indivisible, random and ‘undirected’ particles known as atoms.
Epicurus, though not big on science, was big on sensory experience as the means to replace pain with pleasure. He dismissed the many ancient ‘gods’ as being too angry and therefore not worth his time.
http://kingdomventurers.com/2015/01/18/arent-you-a-bit-epicurious/
http://www.amazon.com/Epicureanism-Origins-Modernity-Catherine-Wilson/dp/0199595550
The Kingdom of God, ushered in when Jesus Christ came to live and die and rise from the dead among us, has made it possible for mankind to reunite facts (science) and values (faith).
Christ’s bodily resurrection is a historical fact. His presence on earth after the resurrection was witnessed by hundreds of Jews and gentiles. Ancient Historians affirm it as well.
And, if you are skeptical about the resurrection of Jesus then I have some empirical evidence for you:
http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430779009&sr=1-1&keywords=jesus+the+eyewitnesses
The Pope is not infallible, and there have been ‘bad’ Popes.
This one is not ‘bad,’ but compared to the likes of Pope John Paul II, this one is proving to be pretty dumb.
Interesting reading on Papal Infallibility:
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/papal-infallibility
Urban VIIIb (aka Frances) is about to screw a pooch of historical moral proportions, thereby placing the truly poor of the world, the global economy, and the Church’s authority at risk.
Religion is best decentralized, like the tea party and our constitution give power to the individual first, directly answering to God, recognizing God given liberties that government can’t rule against.
A church leader might be a pastor or reverend, but it is bothersome to me to call one a “Father”. God is our Father, Jesus Christ was his son, and is our brother.
How does any mortal earn the title of being our spiritual Father? (I can’t speak for Judaism, but I believe in the old testament “Father” Abraham for example, refers to a physical bloodline)
In the early church writings, whether one believes they are absolute truth or just a good book of standards, the standard was “study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth”.
Every individual is to study and think for themself, which happens (largely) in most churches even Catholic in the US, even on subjects under “church domain”. People join or leave churches freely (unless it is a Scientology or the PC Church). Our Christian founders saw fit to grant/recognize individual rights, not church leader powers.
And church leaders serve best on a local and one on one basis, not a global authoritarian/collectivist basis. AGW is just the path to a globalist, redistributionist, communist world. The UN is full of thieves and tyrants, and it is sad to see the pope holding hands on political issues that deny science and conspire against individual freedom.
The Pope’s influence in Europe and the US is a problem, but even more of an issue in the rest of the Americas, where Russia and socialism/communism are gaining more strength. We sure don’t need to have the Pope leading South and Central American Catholics toward full Marxism, in some meeting of the globalists’ minds. But AGW is already known to be one tool of that devil, and Obama’s liberation theology another.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenhayward/2015/05/10/how-is-liberation-theology-still-a-thing/
Islam is a decentralized religion.
Now I know how Galileo felt.
There are no first-hand eyewitness accounts of the resurrection. The Gospels were written decades after the event by anonymous authors in the third person, and none of them ever claims to have met Jesus, let alone witnessed his resurrection.
Do I understand correctly that absent someone who witnessed the instant of the resurrection, there is thus no evidence that the resurrection ever occurred?
“Greenhouse Gas” is an oxymoron. Greenhouses allow radiation and inhibit convection. Any gas that inhibits convection is by definition, not a gas.
It is true that atmospheric gases average the temperature, but water vapor is almost all of that effect. Carbon Dioxide contributes about 3% to averaging and 95% of Carbon Dioxide is from plants. So a 50% reduction of Carbon Dioxide would only affect the temperature a fraction of a degree for a few hours.
If that is not enough, all living things benefit from temperature averaging. For example, wild swings in temperature are used to pasteurize milk. If you want to kill something, wild termperature swings are pretty effective.
CO2 tracks temperature (not vice-versa). More plants grow when it is warmer, and plants account for 95% of the Carbon Dioxide. Scientists have used that fact for decades to determine the temperature of the Earth thousands of years ago. You don’t want to be against science, do you?
In fact, global warming doesn’t even rate as junk science, because no scientific principle supports. It should be considered as sheer superstition.
It has a purpose though. You can reduce carbon, but the concept allows the rich to tax food. They intend to starve a few billion people death. That might sound wierd, but we already have higher food prices in the USA because of global warming food taxes. Yet it is completely impossible to reduce carbon, and if we enjoy life, we would want more carbon.
Perhaps the Pope really wants to starve a couple of billion people to death. I hope not, but he forging forward as if he is an elite player who wants to harm the poor.