Pro-climate-change, pro-life, and anti-population control

Climate change, says Pope Francis, in the new encyclical Laudato Si (Praised be) released today, “represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day” (25).

The environmental tome of 180 pages – the longest encyclical in history – is an often-fascinating read, with many touching passages reflecting on a Catholic vision of care and concern for creation. These many passages, however, are being largely lost and subsumed under the most emphatic – even alarmist – passages devoted to detailed descriptions of “climate change” theory (described as fact) and the dire consequences of failing to take drastic measures to fight such change.

And those startling quotes have stolen the media narrative, making this, at least for the media world and thus the general public, the “climate-change encyclical.” Released, as the encyclical was, just prior to the pope’s visit to the United Nations and the US Congress in September, as well as the World Climate Summit in Paris in December, this narrative was at least partially intentional on the part of the Vatican and the pope.

The stress by the Vatican on the climate change portion could not have been more evident this morning, as one of the world’s leading climate change alarmist gurus, Professor John Schellnhuber, took part in the Vatican press conference introducing Laudato Si. The day before the release of the encyclical, the Vatican also announced that Schellnhuber had been appointed by the pope to the Pontifical Academy for the Sciences.

The new encyclical also continues the tradition launched by popes Benedict and John Paul II of tying respecting nature to respecting life in the womb and God-given gender. The pope also clearly decries the idea of reducing population to address environmental concerns.

While there is much to welcome in the encyclical’s 40,000 words, fears that its text, which is peppered with ominous warnings about climate change, will play into the hands of global warming activists whose agendas include population control and one-world government, do not seem unreasonable. Indeed, the mainstream media is already widely portraying the encyclical as a major coup for mainstream environmentalism, while ignoring the pro-life passages that critique many of the environmentalist movement’s core principles.

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