Laudato Si: the Mountain Gives Birth to a Mouse

And don’t start like the old writer of epic cycles:

‘Of Priam’s fate I’ll sing, and the greatest of Wars.’

What could he produce to match his opening promise?

Mountains will labour: what’s born? A ridiculous mouse!

(Ep.II.3, 136–9)

                                                (Horace, The Art of Poetry)

The huzzahs have begun and the minds have been closed and the Vatican mountain has given birth to a mouse.  Sound and fury have signified nothing.   And the Church's enemies have just been handed another heavy club to beat God's people with.

I look about me and see devastation in the Church.  I see the annihilation of one nation after another to the Devil's favorite perversion - for others, that is; it revolts him so much that even he looks away after helping men to commit this heinous, unnatural vice.  I see a Mass which is a parody of what was once the most beautiful thing on earth, a Sesame Street-styled liturgy that appeals to those with IQ's of about 79.  I see priest after priest, Bishop after Bishop, Cardinal after Cardinal talking filth and heresy and being rewarded while the good Churchmen "are sent empty away".  I see a Church close to extinction, or at least giving every outward sign of it, and with all this staring us in the face the current successor to St Peter is concerned about temperature.

Humans can pollute lakes and streams, yes.  They can befoul the earth with their chemicals and Frankenstein-inspired manipulated seeds.  Shiftless people living off the public welfare can turn once beautiful neighborhoods and cities into garbage cans and crime-ridden hellholes. But are we really being asked to believe that man can affect the vastness of outer space?

To Peter I ask:

Have you perhaps forgotten the social encyclicals of your noble predecessors Leo XIII and Pius XI?  Are you unaware of how saintly monks in the Ages of Faith taught ignorant native peoples how to cultivate and conserve their lands and produce abundant food?  Do you recall the magnificent economy of the Catholic Middle Ages which was so just and so stable that prices stayed about the same for nearly 500 years and men needed only labor for six months to earn enough to feed their families for twelve months?

You rightly condemn corporatism and an unbridled free market, something the Church has done for centuries before you were ever born but never did She give encouragements to governments to get more oppressive, which your encyclical seems, I say seems, to do.  Yes, there are crooks, oligarchs and charlatans who deny the idea of man-made climate change but have you noticed the crooks, oligarchs, charlatans and truly vile men who support that doubtful notion?  And are you aware that ignorant people, myself included, have enough horse sense to realize they are being conned, swindled and maneuvered into a worldwide prison by those who think a million gas lawn mowers can somehow cause the stars to fall from the heavens?

Yes, there are evil people in the world who do terrible damage to the world we live in both environmentally and politically.  Why don't you name them?  Name the big companies protected by the government - the same government that applauds the man-made climate change meme: BayerAG, Monsanto, BASF, etc.

On June 5th Mr Joe Doyle, the distinguished Catholic from Boston, penned this note to The Pilot.  It is worth reflecting upon, Your Holiness:

Acknowledging the obvious — that the text of the encyclical is, as of this date, unknown — five considerations are in order:

1. Catholicism has traditionally criticized liberal capitalism as an economic system, particularly in its treatment of workers and debtors. It is consistent therefore, with traditional Catholic social teaching to extend that critique to an examination of the impact of capitalism on God’s Creation — the natural environment.
2. We should remember, especially in Boston, that an indifference to the environment had a devastating impact on inner city Catholic communities, when, a half century ago, a corporate driven public policy to promote highway construction obliterated urban Catholic  neighborhoods. It was the incipient environmental movement which finally halted the injustice of eminent domain.
3. There is a danger however, in any cooperation with an ecological movement that is militantly secularist, profoundly anti-life, and intrinsically committed to population control.
4. There is also the risk that some in the Church will exploit the encyclical to revive the “seamless garment” argument, in order to diminish the centrality of the struggles to defend the sanctity of innocent human life, and preserve the integrity of traditional marriage and the natural family — the two greatest challenges in the moral order confronting what remains of Christian civilization today.
5. Finally, neither the Holy Father nor any other member of the hierarchy have a specific competence in scientific matters, nor could any ecclesiastical authority bind Catholic in questions which require purely prudential judgments.    

These are the observations of a Catholic who understands the long history of his Church and who doesn't believe the Church was born in 1965. (With thanks to Catholicism.org)  A little bit of Mr Doyle's wise remarks can be found in Laudato Si, but only a little.

Finally, I must ask our Peter this:  how does this encyclical save one soul from the fires of Hell?  How does it in any way heal the deep wounds in Christ's Church?  I know it helps the ignorant and the enemies of the Church, emboldening them.  I know it will drive away, as if using whips and chains, some who might have thought about becoming Catholics.  I know it will attract the superficial, the unthinking, the modernists for whom nothing is a sin except avoiding Modernism, and I know many of these who flock to you now will become sorely disillusioned when, at last, the Church comes back to her senses.

Yes, we weary Catholics will pick through this thing and find the good in it, for there is some good in it to be sure.  While we are being mocked, ridiculed and hated by your new friends we will still point out the few good things we find in it.  Then too, we can make a judgment, not about individual details of your encyclical, good and bad, but of its effect on a weak and dying Church: there was much publicity and public relations effort put into the begetting of this thing, but all your monumental effort has produced a mouse.  There are more serious things to be worrying about, Francis, than this.

And one more thing, Holiness: young people yearn for eternal Truth, not carbon emissions.

And the Gates of Hell still beckon.