Friday, June 26, 2015

Kudos to the Pope, but Not to Catholicism! Pope Francis’s Climate Change Encyclical


 

[A slightly modified version of a one-page leaflet I passed out at a discussion and question-and-answer session on Pope Francis’s new encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si,  held in the Interchurch Center on the campus of the Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana, June 22, 2015.  The event was organized around panel presentations by Jesse Kharbanda, Executive Director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, and Andy Pike, head of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church and School’s Creation Care Ministry.  The discussion with question-and-answer session, open to the public as part of a series of forums held under the sponsorship of the Seminary’s Monday evening SPEA class and organized by the students themselves, while positive on the need for environmental protection and the need for action, focused primarily on the “spiritual” side of the Pope’s encyclical, and what individuals themselves “could do” to advance environmental awareness.  Aside from the students, the great bulk of the audience was decidedly senior, with most of the public attendees easily in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and even 80s, which is reflective of Indianapolis’s aging “progressive” population itself.  The youngish (under 40) Kharbanda, by his own admission, has tried to “broaden the appeal” of environmentalism by pitching the environmental message not only to the usual left and liberal activists and groups, but also to corporations and conservative Christians and other religious; Pike, who is retired, spoke as a Catholic activist on environmental and other issues.  The modified text of the leaflet is directly below.  It is essentially as it was originally composed (admittedly in a hurry) and passed out at the meeting, where it was received with interest—GF]

 

POPE FRANCIS’S CLIMATE CHANGE ENCYCLICAL—
KUDOS TO THE POPE, BUT NOT TO CATHOLICISM!
written on June 22, 2015
 by George Fish, georgefish666@yahoo.com, Indianapolis, Indiana:
ex-Catholic, atheist, democrat, socialist, humanist, secularist


While we can indeed take heart at the Pope’s recent, very positive and needed, affirmative encyclical message and call for action on climate change, Laudato Si’—a message issued so strongly, so urgently, and with such scientific validity it upset climate-change denialists and conservative Catholics to a degree that drove them into frothing rage—let it not stand as a vindication or a prettifying of a still-ugly and ominously regressive Catholic Church.  Of course, we who are secular and democratic in our instincts should be delighted at the viciousness and obtuseness it has excited among the likes of the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue and Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum, notoriously right-wing Catholics and ardent opponents of both science and secularism.  Yet that not serve as pretext for overlooking the still-seamy underside, indeed, even the public face, of official Catholicism:  as illustrated by remarks, and their lack, from Pope Francis himself.


In all honesty, even as we celebrate the Pope’s directness and scientific correctness evinced in Laudato Si’, let us also pointedly note that scientists and secularists have been saying the very same things as the Pope is now saying, and for a good decade previously.  And in honesty, let us also pointedly note that Pope Francis, ever true to official Catholicism even in its open obscurantism, felt obliged to gratuitously insert into his climate change encyclical yet more inappropriate, dogmatic and obscurantist screeds against not only abortion, but even birth control, “officially Catholic” positions even much of the forced-to-remain-silent Catholic lay body objects to; not to mention all of us outside of the Catholic Church who are sick and tired of hearing these monotonous, one-sided mantras that indicate so firmly that Catholicism has yet to actually enter the 21st Century.


Let us not also forget the Pope’s, and the Vatican’s, denunciation of the recent historic vote in traditionally-Catholic Ireland firmly upholding same-sex marriage, a fundamentally decent political and human rights position the still-viciously homophobic Catholic Church insists on repeatedly negating and denouncing; thus denying in its ecclesiastical fulminations the fundamental dignity and humanity or non-heterosexual humanity.  Let us not forget either the Pope’s own backhanded approval given to the Muslim fanatics who committed the Charlie Hedbo massacre, as the Pope himself gave backhanded justification to the murders of the magazine’s staff for “offending” another religion—as if the magazine’s open secularism and anti-clericalism even justified horrific mass murder!  Let us also note the Pope’s own glaring silence on the ethnic cleansing being carried out today in Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka that is being fomented by chauvinistic Buddhist monks.  As well his silence on the ever-prevailing atrocities continually carried out in the name of Islam not only by supposedly “rogue” groups such as ISIS, but even by Islamic states themselves, as in Saudi Arabia and under the military dictatorship in Egypt—not to mention the Islamic suppression of the Arab Spring!


Nor let us forget the still-festering scandal within Catholicism due to rampant priest-pedophilia, and the Vatican’s still-prevailing do-nothing-effective approach to it (Pope Francis did nothing more except appoint yet another commission to “study” the problem).  Nor let us forget the centuries of abuse and suffering meted out to Catholics and non-Catholics alike through the official actions of the Church, in the rampant abuse and abuse of power in the Catholic school system, and the systematic oppression meted out to whole populations, even those that were comprised of stalwart Catholics, in such Catholic countries as Ireland, Spain, and throughout Latin America.  Despite the Pope’s new encouraging words on climate change, Catholicism still has a lot to answer for before the body of secular, democratic humanity.