UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Please consider reading Pope Francis’ final Climate Encyclical here.
After a two year “honeymoon period”, more Catholics are increasingly questioning the actions of the media magnified Pope Francis. This is especially the case as the pope’s ongoing deeds continually fall short of his earlier words. Recent polls show US Catholics are less positive increasingly toward the pope on the environment and the priest sex abuse scandal. A global poll last year showed that most Catholics oppose the pope’s position on contraception and actually support birth control. And Irish Catholic voters recently overwhelmingly rejected the pope’s position on same sex civil marriage. Some see the pope’s “over-hyped” new encyclical on climate change (Climate Encyclical) as the pope’s desperate way of trying positively to change the subject from so much of the negative reporting he now steadily faces.
Pope Francis knows that in a few months he will make a critical visit to the USA, followed by his final “all celibate male bishops” Family Synod on updating the Catholic Church’s positions on sexual morality. Francis should know by now that the Synod will likely once again strongly oppose contraception and same sex marriage. Banning contraception contributes to global warming obviously, despite Pope Francis’ disingenuous efforts in the Climate Encyclical in effect to deny this. Pope Francis also seems to know that he must continue to try to avoid any US presidential or Congressional investigations into the Vatican’s longstanding priest child abuse cover up, as are presently underway in Australia, the UK and elsewhere.
Pope Francis faces many unfolding scandals, including those related to the priest child abuse and to bishops who appear to cover up the abuse, such as Cardinal George Pell of Australia, Archbishop John Nienstedt of Minneapolis (USA) and Bishop Juan Barros of Chile, and even to the scandal of alleged child abuse by former US House Speaker, Dennis Hastert , as well as to the pope’s major defeat by Irish voters.
The pope’s basic message in the Climate Encyclical, and in currently reaffirming therein the earlier encyclical of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, that banned the birth control pill in 1968, is that the world, especially Catholics, need to increase the number of humans by avoiding effective contraception, and then, to reduce global warming by having this resulting larger number of humans consume even less. That makes little sense, for the poor or anyone else. Once again, despite papal pontifications to the contrary, the Vatican is in effect sacrificing the poor, especially many millions of children and women, to maximize papal power and wealth tied to the papal claim of infallibility.
Pope Francis cleverly in his “over-hyped” Climate Encyclical seeks to preserve pro-actively and premptively the unique cornerstone of papal power since 1870 — infallibility. In the minds of millions of Catholics, infallibility has been essentially linked, after Pope Pius XI’s 1930 geo-politically motivated ban on birth control, to all subsequent popes’ opposition to effective family planning, including contraception, as “sinful”.
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