Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Pope's Encyclical Leaked

In an act that the Vatican has denounced as sabotage, someone has leaked a draft of the Pope's encyclical on climate change.  A copy was obtained by L'Espresso magazine and published on Monday.

At the start of the draft essay, the pope wrote, the Earth “is protesting for the wrong that we are doing to her, because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods that God has placed on her. We have grown up thinking that we were her owners and dominators, authorised to loot her. The violence that exists in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also manifest in the symptoms of illness that we see in the Earth, the water, the air and in living things.”



6 comments:

Northern PoV said...

I like this guy! Remember the old saying/joke? "Is the Pope Catholic?"

Sounds like Francis worships Gaia! ;-) (many refs to 'her'.)
A good thing, imho and a big improvement on worshiping dead or imaginary guys.

Next: Francis could agree with the (Catholic) birth control pill inventor*:
the pill is natural thus OK by God... so then the condom is OK too by same logic...
He hit a home run with climate change - why not a grand slam with population control?

*Funny: I went looking for his name, John Rock, and up pops Gladwell! LOL
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/03/13/john-rocks-error-2

The Mound of Sound said...

I'm dismayed when the pope's critics ignore all the progressive measures he advances and denounce him because of something like his stand on birth control and overpopulation. When it comes to popes, judging from what I've seen over the past 60+ years, I'll settle for 90% any day.

What worries me, NPoV, is what the next pope will do. Will the RC church be dragged back into the darkness, Francis' enlightenment expunged?

I do, however, agree that he's only touching two bases - climate change and over-consumption. It's difficult to expect huge progress on either without also tackling overpopulation. Yet one can't help but notice that no one, nobody, is willing to address overpop. That's possibly because no one believes it's a fixable problem.

Anyong said...

Popes nor the RC church like to talk about birth control. Why? They believe they have and practice the RIGHT faith and the way they keep it that way is through numbers and brain washing. Numbers? How? By demanding there be no birth control. However, it is ludicrous to talk about the environment without discussing population...that is the simple truth. Where in the bible did Christ talk about numbers. If it is to be said Christ said, "Go Forth and Multiply" that is so but he was talking about going forth and spread the word of "God"....very simple. But people can make the bible mean anything want.

Lorne said...

As far as I know, Mound, the injunction against birth control comes from the Old yestyament Genesis passage in which God says "Be fruitful and multiply." Literalists ignore the the fact that scriptures are reflections of culture within a specific historical framework. To suggest that as the basis for forbidding artificial means of birth control seems like madness.

But I agree with you that Pope Francis' progressive nature should be widely respected. Who knows what else might be possible in the future under his leadership?

Anonymous said...

Harper did it.

Purple library guy said...

Yeah, it's fine for The Big Dude (not to be confused with The Dude) to say to Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. There were only two of them. So, fair enough, a species that small isn't what you'd call viable.
We're not in quite that situation any more.

Luckily when it comes to Catholics, there's some things the priests say that they pay attention to and some things they don't, and for an awful lot of them the "no birth control" thing is in the second category.

For a lot of the people doing the most reproducing, I bet if you gave them ready access to free birth control they'd stop, or slow down drastically.