Who’s Afraid of Pope Francis?

[AdamSmith]

Who’s Afraid of Pope Francis?

Garry Wills

An authentic pope should be a scary one. Jesus scared the dickens out of people (it cost him his life). Is Pope Francis truly scary? One might think so from the reaction of some guardians of orthodoxy, men like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who thinks he must threaten the pope with schism to protect the sanctity of marriage, since “this pope may be preserved from error only if the church itself resists him.” But ecclesiastical nitpickers have no armies of similar thinkers to summon. This is not even medium scary.

Now, however, something is looming that has billionaires shaking in their boots, and when Catholic billionaires shake, Catholic bishops get sympathetic shudders. These are the men who build their churches, hospitals, schools, and libraries. Catholic lore has made winning over such Money Men the mark of the true church leader—the Bing Crosby priest crooning dollars out of a cranky donor in Going My Way, or the J. F. Powers priest putting up with a wealthy boor to get a golf course for his retreat house.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan was recently reminded of these facts of churchly life by Kenneth Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot. The cardinal is working to restore St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, at a cost of $175 million. Langone asked why he and his fellow benefactors should raise such money when the pope is denouncing “the idolatry of money.” He said the pope’s criticism will make his fellow donors “incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.”

But this, too, was a minor threat. Langone was simply threatening to withhold money. Now, as the pope prepares a major encyclical on climate change, to be released this summer, the billionaires are spending a great deal of their money in a direct assault on him. They are calling in their chits, their kept scientists, their rigged conferences, their sycophantic beneficiaries, their bought publicists to discredit words of the pope that have not even been issued: “He would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” they say. They do not know exactly what the pope is going to say in his forthcoming encyclical on preserving God’s creation, but they know what he will not say. He will not deny that the poor suffer from actions that despoil the earth. Everything he has said and done so far shows that Francis always stands for the poor.

Those who profit from what harms the earth have to keep the poor out of sight. They have trouble enough fighting off the scientific, economic, and political arguments against bastioned privilege. Bringing basic morality to the fore could be fatal to them. That is why they are mounting such a public pre-emptive strike against the encyclical before it even appears. They must not only discredit the pope’s words (whatever they turn out to be), they must block them, ridicule them, destroy them. The measure of their fear is demonstrated by an article in First Things, the Catholic journal that defended the donations to bishops of the pederast religious founder Marcial Maciel. The First Things writer Maureen Mullarkey calls the pope “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist,” and continues: “Francis sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.”

The editor of First Things later apologized for the uncivil tone of this piece—but he ran the piece, which is the real act of incivility. These people are really, really scared. When they calm down enough to make some kind of argument, they fall back on their mantra of recent years, claiming nobody really knows anything for sure about the state of the earth. “I’m not a scientist,” they say. Such professed ignorance would make honest people try to learn from the scientists what they do not know. Instead, the implication is that “If I don’t know, nobody can know; it is arrogant to pretend anyone else can know what I don’t know.”

They are now adapting this argument to fit the pope. He is not a scientist, we are assured, so he cannot say anything on scientific matters. Actually, this pope knows more about scientific method than people realize. He spent three years as a young man doing experiments in a chemistry laboratory under a very strict supervisor, Esther Balestrino de Careaga.

But this is beside the point. The real issue here is not science vs. ignorance, or the UN vs. xenophobia, or my 97 percent of experts against your 3 percent. It is a case of the immensely rich few against the many deprived poor. The few are getting much of their wealth from interlocking interests that despoil the earth. The fact that the poor get poorer in this process is easily dismissed, denied, or derided. The poor have no voice. Till now. If the pope were not a plausible voice for the poor, his opponents would not be running so scared. Their fear is a testimony to him.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/30/whos-afraid-pope-francis/

[AdamSmith]

The inadvertent hilarity of the Heartland Institute vs. Pope Francis Each e-mail from their press office offers a mix of comedy and tragedy.

by John Timmer - Apr 30, 2015 12:44pm EDT

Ars Technica

A little while back, word filtered out that Pope Francis was going to devote an encyclical to climate change. It's not much of a surprise; his tenure has featured a strong emphasis on caring for the poor, and the poor are in no position to air-condition, flood-proof, and bioengineer their way out of the worst impacts of climate change.

As part of the preparation for the encyclical, there's a meeting going on at the Vatican Science Academy that's focused on climate change. Guests include everyone from Ban Ki-moon to Nobel Prize winning scientists. Not on the guest list was the Heartland Institute, most notable for putting up a billboard suggesting that people who cared about climate change might be just as deranged as Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.

When in Rome...

But Heartland decided to go to Rome anyway. I know this because someone has signed me up to its press mailing list, which offers up quotes from expertise-free "experts" that make you wonder whether some of them might need an intervention—or simply a trip back to Earth from whatever planet they seem to be inhabiting.

In the case of the meeting at the Vatican, Heartland starts off relatively restrained. "The Heartland Institute," its release says, "has brought real scientists to Rome this week to dissuade Pope Francis from lending his moral authority to the politicized and unscientific climate agenda of the United Nations."

While there are two people with scientific training among the people Heartland has brought, the group is also taking someone with a PhD in Scottish history and the former general counsel for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia, along with Marc Morano, a former staffer for Sen. James Inhofe (the Oklahoma republican who has called climate change a hoax), who is now a full-time climate troll who publishes the contact information of scientists so they can be harassed. And Christopher Monckton, who is, well... a bit bonkers.

The group's president, Joseph Bast, is a bit less restrained, saying, "The Holy Father is being misled by ‘experts’ at the United Nations who have proven unworthy of his trust." And, of course, the real issue here—money—gets prominent billing, with the release warning the Pope that "there is no need for a radical reordering of global economies that will cause massive reductions in human freedom and prosperity."

If the idea of the Pope changing his mind because a bunch of fringe figures used some of the Koch's money to hop a plane to Rome amuses you, you should do your best to get on the Heartland mailing list as well. But in case you can't or won't sign up, I thought I'd share some of the gems that have appeared in my inbox over the last year or so.

Earth Day, Shmearth Day!

Heartland Science Director Jay Lehr also railed against Earth Day: "Anti-progress zealots began to realize EPA and environmental issues could be used to stop people from improving their lives by ensuring the economy could not advance and energy would never become inexpensive," he wrote. "Today’s Earth Day is all but a symbol of evil, managed by those who care not at all for humans and in fact do no good for nature or the animal world. Most activities are vile recriminations staged by those who wish to keep the poor just where they are: poor.”

On the same topic, Heartland also quotes one Alan Caruba, who is the founder of something called The National Anxiety Center: "Earth Day was declared in 1970 and for the past 45 years we have all been living in the Environmental Insane Asylum, being told over and over again to believe things that are the equivalent of Green hallucinations."

Heartland also pushed out a press release when President Obama gave a speech linking climate change to impacts on human health. Folks at Heartland didn't like it. “If President Barack Obama really was ‘committed to combating the health impacts of climate change and protecting the health of future generations,’" said Tom Harris, a mechanical engineer who wound up as the executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, "he would promote an expansion of coal-fired electricity generation." Which is quite certainly the form of electricity generation that causes the most health problems.

Alan Caruba also made another appearance. In this case, he completely ignored any health implications in order to rant about, among other things, solar power. "Many sellers of solar panels for residents are using fraudulent claims, hyping the so-called economic benefits of these systems. If the public is made aware of the fraud, sales will cease except for the most brain-challenged people in the country," he wrote. He went on to say that "President Barack Obama is fully engaged in the huge ‘climate change’ hoax that lacks any basis in science."

Facts are hard

Caruba also came out with this whopper about the US plan to cut carbon emissions: "[Obama] failed to mention that such levels would be comparable to what they were in the U.S. Civil War era 150 years ago." 2005 emissions were 7.1 billion tons; Obama plans to cut that to 5.3 billion tonnes. That rate was actually last seen in the mid-1980s.

When the administration announced new rules governing the release of methane during drilling, which sane people might consider wasteful, Heartland blew another gasket. "Contrary to radical environmentalists’ claims, Methane is NOT an important greenhouse gas (GHG); it has a totally negligible impact on climate," said Fred Singer. Of course, methane currently has nearly 30 percent of the impact of carbon dioxide—not exactly "totally negligible." Singer has been involved with various think tanks that oppose any action on climate change for 25 years now.

Others just argued that despite the boom in fossil fuel production during Obama's term, the president was actually trying to push energy companies out of business. "Now that the United States is the world’s biggest energy producer—though suffering as a victim of its own success—President Obama is embarking on a crazed plan that will kick our nation’s oil-and-gas producers while they are down," said Marita Noon, the executive director of the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy. Meanwhile, the managing editor of Environment & Climate News, Sterling Burnett, said, "Once again, without any reason other than to please his radical environmental constituents, President Obama is making it harder for the oil and gas industry to do business."

That's just this year so far. With the majority of the year still to come, I'm sure there will be many other chances to enjoy the Heartland's missives. Though they do make me worry about these people—they seem so angry...

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/30/the-inadvertent-hilarity-of-the-heartland-institute-vs-pope-francis/

[RA1]

Mother Nature can take care of herself. We might not like it but she can.

My question is: How can the Pope (or anyone else) defend poor people on the one hand and then promote their increase on the other?

I agree we should not defile the Earth. However, one of its chief polluters is the population itself.

Best regards,

RA1

[lookin]

My question is: How can the Pope (or anyone else) defend poor people on the one hand and then promote their increase on the other?

I understand that poor people tend to pollute less than rich people and, so far as I know, His Holiness is not calling for an increase in the number of Koch brothers.

[AdamSmith]

He did also turn heads by saying the faithful should nonetheless not "breed like rabbits."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/20/catholics-dont-have-to-breed-like-rabbits-says-pope-francis

[RA1]

I suppose there is a corollary something like, "And the rich shall always be with us".

One problem with homilies, sermons and the like is they are words, not deeds. Yes, I know the pen is mightier than the sword but what about my 40 caliber?

Some posters herein like to quote "scientific findings" to support global warming and its cause. Isn't it pretty much a scientific fact that the Rhythm Method is about as reliable as saying I am disease free?

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

Isn't it pretty much a scientific fact that the Rhythm Method is about as reliable as saying I am disease free?

Very observant of you, RA1. Used in conjunction with a rubber both are equally safe and effective.

====

PS What, you got a 40 cal?

A S&W?

A Glock?

OOO, OOO, I know...

SNIPER RIFLE!

Now that's some real eye candy.

[RA1]

True but only approved by some US Catholic priests for the honeymoon.

Now how do I use a rubber with my 40 caliber Sig Sauer? I do not believe it will be quieter. It will not be safer, especially for miscreants trying to bother me. Please enlighten me.

Best regards,

RA1