On Wednesday, Pope Francis used his official office to complain that efforts to control so-called climate change are not moving fast enough to suit him and the Catholic Church. In his latest apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, or “Praise God,” the pontiff attacked Western civilization in general and the United States in particular as reasons that the Earth will soon reach a “point of no return” where it will be too late to halt the worst effects of climate change.
Laudate Deum is considered by most to be a follow-up to Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ in which, among other things, the pope appeared to call for a one-world government and Agenda 21-type controls on the world’s currency, food supply, military forces, property, and immigration measures.
Wednesday’s exhortation was focused on climate change and what the pope feels we need to do about it.
The pontiff warned that the earth was quickly reaching a “point of no return” in efforts to keep warming to the United Nations’ limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the pre-industrial average.
“Even if we do not reach this point of no return, it is certain that the consequences would be disastrous and precipitous measures would have to be taken, at enormous cost and with grave and intolerable economic and social effects,” Francis wrote.
Those “enormous costs” are entirely worth it, in the pope’s opinion.
“Although the measures that we can take now are costly, the cost will be all the more burdensome the longer we wait,” Francis wrote.
Efforts to control so-called global warming are moving entirely too slow to meet the pope’s expectations, as he claims “the necessary transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed.”
Francis was critical of climate realists, who he feels are slowing down efforts to turn the world completely socialist.
“In recent years, some have chosen to deride these facts. They bring up allegedly solid scientific data, like the fact that the planet has always had, and will have, periods of cooling and warming,” the pope complained. “They forget to mention another relevant datum: that what we are presently experiencing is an unusual acceleration of warming, at such a speed that it will take only one generation — not centuries or millennia — in order to verify it. The rise in the sea level and the melting of glaciers can be easily perceived by an individual in his or her lifetime, and probably in a few years many populations will have to move their homes because of these facts.
The pope excoriated those who would blame global warming on the poor.
“In an attempt to simplify reality, there are those who would place responsibility on the poor, since they have many children, and even attempt to resolve the problem by mutilating women in less developed countries. As usual, it would seem that everything is the fault of the poor,” Francis wrote.
The pontiff declared that the United States was particularly guilty of sins of avarice when it came to climate change.
“If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact,” he wrote.
Francis also lambasted the UN’s Conference of the Parties’ process of annual international meetings, which he appeared to say are inadequate to meet the needs associated with climate change.
He quoted his own Laudato si’, saying “international negotiations cannot make significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their national interests above the global common good. Those who will have to suffer the consequences of what we are trying to hide will not forget this failure of conscience and responsibility.”
Some found the pope’s insistence on joining the climate-hysteric bandwagon decidedly un-Christian.
“Pope Francis promotes the death cult that wants to destroy civilization, says ‘irresponsible’ Western lifestyle must change to save Earth from global warming,” Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton posted on X.
Michael Hichborn of the Catholic organization Lepanto Institute said that Francis was in danger of abandoning the church’s moral authority to atheists.
“Francis’ new climate document Laudate Deum ‘dangerously asserts the transference of moral authority to atheistic globalists who serve not God, but the Prince of this World,’” Hichborn said.
It’s hard to know exactly why the pontiff has taken this stand on climate change, which seems to be anti-God, as Hichborn states, and anti-human, as Fitton states. One of the best ways to help the poor that Francis is rightly concerned with is to give them access to cheap, efficient energy. That can never be accomplished with so-called renewable energy — only fossil fuels can meet that need.
