Kudos to Morano, CFACT and Heartland for their quickly organized and now apparently effective mission. Even with the heavy criticism received, the Vatican seems to have blinked.
Craig Rucker of CFACT writes:
‘According to Vaticanist Sandro Magister, Pope Francis has decided to postpone the publication of his long-awaited encyclical on the environment. The reason, according to Magister, is that the Pope realized that the document in its current state had no chance of receiving the approval of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under the leadership of Cardinal Gerhard Müller.’
Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga came out swinging against the delegation of climate realists that recently traveled to the Vatican and featured CFACT’s Marc Morano. Politico reports that, “the Pope’s closest adviser on Tuesday slammed climate-change skeptics, blaming capitalist motivations from ‘movements in the United States.’”
Crux reports that Cardinal Rodríguez said that environmentalism 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.” Cardinal Rodriguez is an adherent of left-wing “liberation theology.”
Cardinalrating.com reports that he has likened global Capitalism to Nazism, declared a fence between the U.S. and Mexico to be comparable to the “Berlin Wall,” called for the complete “forgiveness” of the national debts of developing world nations, and called the American embargo of Cuba “ridiculous.”
Cardinal Rodriguez has been considered a papal candidate himself. “He is young enough, say many Vatican watchers, that he could be considered again.”
The Vatican needs take a hard, independent look at global warming science and ideology for itself and wake up to the reality that the warming campaign’s case is collapsing on its merits. Climate computer models have been wrong for the past 18 years and the weather is historically normal. The proposed solutions would enrich an elite few, but do nothing meaningful to alter the climate.
Capitalism and freedom have done more for the well-being of people and the planet than any other competing political-economic system.
Denying the world’s poor these crucial engines of opportunity, prosperity and human dignity, while starving them of energy, would be a tragic mistake.
History teaches us time and again that Socialism and the centralized planning that go with it are inefficient and cause great suffering.
Hopefully the Vatican is listening to loyal Catholics like Marc Morano and reassessing its position on the climate issue.
There is reason to be hopeful.
Word has it, according to Vaticanist Sandro Magister, Pope Francis has decided to postpone the publication of his long-awaited encyclical on the environment. The reason, according to Magister, is that the Pope realized that the document in its current state had no chance of receiving the approval of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under the leadership of Cardinal Gerhard Müller.
You can follow this breaking story on Climate Depot.
Does this mean there will be a change in tenor in the upcoming encyclical? Marc’s mission may have caught their attention?
Time will tell.
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“declared a fence between the U.S. and Mexico to be comparable to the “Berlin Wall,”
Interesting stance when this is the least protected border in any western nation. Would this guy be okay with 20plus million immigrants to italy the last few decades?
Mexico used to shoot illegal crossers of its southern border. Now it just rounds them up and sends them home without trial. Unless they’re riding on trains definitely bound for the USA, like the tens of thousands of often sick kids invited in by Obama.
“Berlin Wall…”
Doesn’t this guy know the Berlin Wall was built to keep people in a socialist country from escaping to a free (capitalist) one? The Mexican border wall is about controlling a population that wants to get to what capitalism can provide – had Mexico built it, I can see (maybe) the analogy, but built by us, it’s an absolute contradiction to everything the Berlin Wall was built for.
It’s bad enough that these types don’t know climate science, but you’d think they would at least know history and politics…
Taylor
Note the grotesque immorality of Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga implied in his statement that, “[the] American embargo of Cuba [is] “ridiculous.””
Cuba, under the Castros, has murdered thousands of political prisoners since 1959. They remain a police-state, which murders, oppresses, and tyrannizes its citizenry. During the Cuban missile crisis, Fidel Castro encouraged Khrushchev to start a nuclear war with the US, offering Cuban help and participation. Cuba remains a haven of the profoundly evil. And yet, according to Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, embargoing that state is ridiculous.
Pope Francis recently met with Raoul Castro. So apparently unrepentant collusion in mass murder is not enough to repel the pope or Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga.
Does anyone need more proof that these men are ethical imbeciles, whose morality includes bias in favor of mass murderers? It appears, for Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, that free trade is a far worse offense against god and morality than mass murder. Presuming Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga finds mass murder offensive. We lack evidence that he does so.
History repeats itself.
“In 1939 Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope Pius XII. As head of the Catholic Church during the war years, he signed the Concordat (agreement) with Nazi Germany. The Catholic Church, as an organisation, did not protest against any of the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi state.”
“The Vatican knew of the murder of the Jews very early on, as they had religious representatives in all of the occupied countries. Certain individual priests saved Jews but the Church, as an official body, did nothing significant to save the Jews of Europe.”
http://www.theholocaustexplained.org/ks3/responses-1933-1945/what-did-individuals-do/how-did-the-catholic-church-respond/#.VVQ06fmeAXA
I am trying to stay out of these discussions, but sometimes it just gets too hard to do so.
The Catholic Church rightly deserves criticism for many things, but also gets unfairly criticized for many others things. The Pope’s actions during WWII is certainly one of the unfair criticisms:
http://www.catholic.com/documents/how-pius-xii-protected-jews
Isn’t it convenient the Pope made an alliance with the Nazis by signing the Concordat in 1939 when Hitler was at the height of his power? Then in 1943 when the Allied Forces invaded Italy and Mussolini, an ally of Hitler, was ousted, the Pope began criticizing the Nazis. Perhaps to gain favor with the Allied Forces, which was winning against the war. If the Pope was sincere, there would be no agreement with Hitler in the first place. It was politics. Always be on the winning side. Of course Vatican reinterprets history and insists it was morality.
To paraphrase Stalin, how many divisions did the Pope have? None, of course. So quit characterizing Pope Pius’s actions without historical context. It is beneath you and anyone else.
Certainly, Dr. Strangelove, the Pope should have had his countless minions just rattle their halberds to have the Axis quaking in its jackboots. It’s not as if he was surrounded by millions of Fascist troops. The Vatican is on a fortified island somewhere, innit?
/sarc
Thanks, Marc Morano. I hope you shone a light.
I think you were lucky to come out of Rome unburnt.
BTW, a papal encyclical does not necessarily imply infallibility and rarely does. Infallibility is only brought out when the Pope speaks on matters of dogma, like the deity of Jesus or the Holy Trinity. Most of what people think of as Church dogma, is not. If it is not dogma it may change over time, like eating meat on Friday. Let’s hope this article is correct in its assumptions.
Perhaps my prayers have been answered. 🙂
Isn’t this Cardinal Gerhard Müller most important?
So unless he just goes along with this Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga then the latter`s opinions have a lot less weight- the former is not much a leader if he follows the latter. Shouldn’t the address the former much more.
Anyway the versions of the Bible are so inconsistent that a committed Christian bible expert ceased being Christian.
If the Vatican can’t run a church that is safe for children to attend what makes them think they’re in a leadership role in chaotic sciences?
***it’s all over folks – even the UN has surrendered:
13 May: Reuters: Alister Doyle: New climate deal seen aiding GDP, lacking sanctions: U.N. chief
A U.N. deal to combat global warming due in December will seek to lift world economic growth and be based more on encouragement than threats of punishment for non-compliance, the U.N.’s climate chief said on Wednesday…
The looser formula is a sharp shift from the U.N.’s 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which originally bound about 40 rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions and foresaw sanctions that were never imposed even when Japan, Russia and Canada dropped out.
***Figueres dismissed fears by many developing nations, which have no binding targets under Kyoto and fear that a Paris accord due to enter into force from 2020 could force them to cut fossil fuel use, undermining economic growth.
***”The bottom line (is that) this is an agreement and a path that is protective of growth and development rather than threatening to growth and development,” Figueres told an online news conference.
The deal would be “enabling and facilitating” rather than a “punitive-type” agreement, she said. The deal’s main thrust would be to decouple greenhouse gas emissions from gross domestic product growth…
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/05/13/us-climatedeal-un-idUKKBN0NY2AD20150513
nonetheless, another lecture from Christiana, which falls on deaf ears:
13 May: WaPo: Joby Warrick: UN climate official pans idea of Arctic drilling in subtle slap at Obama administration
The United Nations’ top climate official took a subtle poke at the Obama administration on Wednesday over its decision to conditionally allow oil exploration off Alaska’s coast, suggesting that the Arctic’s oil and gas should stay underground.
Despite the tentative green light given to Shell Gulf of Mexico earlier this week, both the environment and Shell’s stockholders would be best served if such projects are shelved, said Christiana Figueres, the executive director of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
“There is an increasing amount of analysis that points to the fact that we have to keep the great majority of fossil fuels underground,” Figueres said at a news conference…
Figueres was responding to a question about the Interior Department’s decision on Monday to grant conditional approval to Shell’s plan to begin exploratory drilling later this year in the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska’s northeastern coast…
Figueres said she would not comment on the specifics of a U.S. policy decision. But generally speaking, she said, spending huge sums to extract fossil fuels from remote environments — what she termed “high-cost carbon investments” — is a risky proposition.
“One has to question the prudence of moving forward with those kinds of investments,” she said. “It is very evident that climate policy is advancing and progressing.”…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/05/13/un-climate-official-pans-idea-of-arctic-drilling-in-subtle-slap-at-obama-administration/
Judge Not, lest Thee Be Judged
I see nothing on the Internerd quoting Sandro Magister concerning postponement of the putative climate encyclical in the past week. I’m becoming increasingly skeptical that there’s a story here. I hope I’m wrong.
The Catholic Church will continue losing adherents in the US and perhaps other parts of the developed world if its pedophile protection scandal is followed up by a Communist pope pushing the watermelon line of lies.
Very likely. Its relevance has been dropping for decades, now. Truly it was said, “By their fruits you will know them.”
There is already a movement for an American Catholic Church, along the lines of the Anglican rejection of Rome, but without the president in the role of the English monarch as leader. Since the Roman rite already uses the vernacular, it’s already part way there.
An American Catholic Church would probably be even more “progressive” than the Roman, certainly on married priests and same-sex marriage, if not abortion.
While not a Catholic, I’d hate to see the Church go away, since parochial schools are IMO an important counterbalance to government monopoly on education. And would the Italian government inherit all that property, including the world’s greatest art?
Surely the headline should be:
“Is the Vatican backing off from its climate change position?”
if they are on something shouldn’t they be falling off it ?
Not to worry. If it’s true that Cardinal Gerhard Müller is an impediment there are enough Cardinals supporting the Pope they elected to move Cardinal Gerhard Müller off to building the largest cathedral in Nuuk, Greenland. Oh, and it’s a much used ploy to postpone a completely voluntary political action to allow time to work it’s Alzheimer’s magic.
Perhaps some Christians are really Christian and just can’t go along with a plan that would hit the poor the worst.
It appears some cooler heads have come together At the Vatican, & defuse the spin.
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/keeping-a-cool-head-on-pope-francis-environment-encyclical/
Zappa, as usual, had the it right.
“There’s a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.”
“Tax the churches.”
“Tax the businesses owned by the churches.”
“You ain’t got nothing and they got it all and your miserable ass is up against the wall.”
Oh, yeah, “He’s got $20m in his heavenly bank account”.
There is NO difference between the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury or Jimmy Swaggert. They’re all in it for one thing, and none of them are thinking of you as they count the takings.
“You can choose to disbelieve it, but the Bible has never been disproven by evidence.” – Janice Moore
I believe you. To quote from the bible:
“As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace. If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder. You may enjoy the spoils of your enemies that the LORD your God has given you.” (Deuteronomy 20:10-14)
The bible has never been disproven by evidence. History proved the faithful committed horrible crimes in obedience to the Lord. More horrible crimes in the name of the Lord http://www.evilbible.com/Rape.htm
The Bible most certainly has been “disproven” by science. Anyone who believes this blatant lie has never read the Bible, never studied science or both. Descriptions of the natural world in it are ludicrously wrong.
As the passages I cited show, in the Bible, the is supported by pillars, so that it cannot move. A flat earth is covered by a solid dome, upon which God walks and operates the levers of the storehouses of rain and snow. There are windows in it for the sun and moon to pass through. Stars hang from it.
Nowhere is there a mention of a spherical earth, let alone its going around the sun. The author of Genesis 1 plainly did not know that day and night are caused by the sun, let alone the rotations of the “immobile” earth. Day and night exist in Genesis before God creates the sun. The author’s thought was pre-scientific, so he could not even deduce from the position of the “rising” and “setting” sun that light came from it, although he felt that heat did.
Serpents and donkeys talk. Rabbits chew their cud. The list is endless. Besides which, in many books, its “science” contradicts itself from page to page, as with the unresolvable incompatibility between the irreconcilable creation myths in Genesis 1 and 2. Suggesting that the Bible is compatible with science is ludicrous, and theologically preposterous.
Sorry. Please insert “earth” before “is”. I was interrupted.
sturgishooper on May 15, 2015 at 12:57 pm
– – – – – – –
sturgishooper,
Your topic is interesting.
I would approach the discussion of the inquiry into the Bible’s relevance to science in a different manor. Question #1 – I would ask does the Bible provide any treatment of what is the process that is called science? Given that the science process produces knowledge, the knowledge is evolving continuously if it is produced by the science process. Question #2 – Does the Bible say its knowledge is conditional on the continuously evolving fruits of the science process?
First, before I give my answers to those two questions, we should look at the history of science prior to Jesus of Nazareth’s life. There was already in Greece, starting ~590 B.C. with Anaximander and ending with the death of Archimedes ~200 BC, a significant definition of principles of the science process; definition that provided some of the essential principles in our current modern science process. Two centuries before the life of Jesus of Nazareth’s there was already established within Greece and its Mediterranean settlements clear public awareness of a science process that is related to our modern science process.
The answer to my two questions above is no and no. The Bible is not inclusive of the cultural product of the already existent publically known Greek science process that had been in the Northeastern and Eastern Mediterranean for half a dozen hundreds of year earlier.
John
John,
I agree. As I’ve said in comments here, it’s surprising that the New Testament is as pre-scientific as the Old, given its having been written in the first through (probably) third centuries AD, when pagan science was quite advanced (although still suffering from a geocentric consensus). The OT’s pre-scientific nature is less surprising, its having been written before and during the first period of Greek science. The Holy Land and Mesopotamia didn’t come under Hellenistic influences (thanks to Alexander) until after most if not all of the OT was written.
The Early Church Fathers nevertheless stuck to the biblical flat earth cosmology despite living in scientifically advanced Alexandria. Augustine rightfully wrote that this prescientific attitude was costing the Church adherents, so argued for a non-literal interpretation of Genesis, c. AD 400.
sturgishooper on May 15, 2015 at 2:02 pm
– – – – – – – –
sturgishooper,
Yes, your term ‘pre-scientific’ is appropriate.
It is revealing that the NT part of the Bible is ‘pre-scientific’ when the science process was known for a half dozen centuries.
I think the bible is important in that mythology is important as a story telling guide to life. I think Joseph Campbell’s studies on myth had it right.
John
Couldn’t agree more.
Both the mythological and legendary parts of the Bible contain wonderful stories which I’ve always enjoyed. The more or less historical parts after about 800 BC are also useful, despite the spin they put on events.
Studying the Bible is rewarding, IMO, and made even moreso by trying to understand what it really says, rather than trying to read into it garbage which simply isn’t there, as do twisting literalists and creationists, who don’t even understand their own religions and appear never actually to have read the document.
PS:
To me, a pre-scientific mindset explains observations by making up stories about them. Hence the explanation for the rainbow in the Noah story.
The scientific mindset uses deductive and inductive reasoning, based upon testing hypotheses with direct or experimental observation. The Greeks made great advances in understanding, using the earliest forms of the scientific method. For instance, they realized that the earth is a sphere and were able to measure it with some accuracy, while biblical literalists still thought it was flat, based upon the plain text of scripture.
– – – – – –
If that can be independently corroborated by other independent sources and if the Vatican itself clarifies whether it has now decided (based on the recent Vatican conference in Rome) to take time to adopt more circumspect views and to allow considerations of more skeptically inclusive positions, then that strategy of Morano, CFACT and Heartland had major accomplishments in the name of objective science.
John
Those who want to know about Galileo can start here: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html
Galileo had Mann’s personality but it was easier to get lucky back then.
All you know is that the Pope knows nothing about global warming, Cardinal Pell does know a lot, the global warming advocates were pushing him in one direction, there was push back (thank you Heartland).
Religion should not be discussed on this site. It generates ignorant comments faster than a global warmist having a seizure.
Joe,
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a doctrine of the Green Religion. It is only now that “AGW and Climate Change are being discussed in their proper venue. Finally!
Did the church astronomer get his input through to the Vatican?
The approach to the Vatican in Rome by a skeptical contingent (sponsored by Heartland / CFACT / Morano) is a strictly pragmatic move absent the intellectual problems of religion of Paul of Tarsus on the one hand compared to objective science on the other. And I thought when it was first posted at WUWT that there was no downside to the pragmatic move. It appears that there hasn’t been any downside to the pragmatic move.
However, the fundamental intellectual problem remains that objective science and the religion of Paul of Tarsus are profoundly irrelevant to each other on formal epistemological and metaphysical grounds. And the demarcation by science of what is within science will always be in significant dispute epistemologically and metaphysically with the demarcation by theology of what is within the religion of Paul of Tarsus. That situation does not give me the idea that objective science and the religion of Paul of Tarsus are compatible; au contraire mon ami .
John
I am glad that Marc Morano and the other skeptics at Heartland Institute made an impact upon the Pope and whoever is advising the Pope. It would have been bad for the Church if this Pope had issued an encyclical based solely upon what the idiot Cardinal Rodriguez and the green science advisors surrounding the Pope are telling him.
ditto.
Vatican press office denies rumor that Pope’s encyclical on environment has been postponed.
http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=24931
The Vatican press, according to George Weigel, is in a terribly messy state.
Damn it, Mark.R, what have you done? Inconvenient truths (i.e. facts) are not liked here…
Another rehash to be read carefully: http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/05/15/pope-allegedly-halts-publication-of-eco-encyclical-amid-controversy/
How long would a rewrite take? Not long enough to delay publication past June 30, I’d guess. Chop out Maradiaga’s ignorant, spittle-spewing Marxist comments on climate, add a few more references to charity and justice, quote Jesus out of context a few more times, cut and paste to cover the gaps, and it’ll be ready to roll out. Forty eight hours, tops, to have the next draft ready for review by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Maradiaga’s rant is no surprise to me, ever since I became aware of the neo-Marxist position of Catholic bishops in Seattle WA.
And it appears Anglicans in Canada, and perhaps UK, are of similar bias. (The two churches are very similar, despite historical politics. (Note too the eco-bias of British royalty at least from Prince Phillip and Prince Charles.))
The Anglican church may be known in the US and Scotland as “Episcopal”.