The Vatican under the frenetic political activism of Pope Francis has become a nest of extreme environmentalists. Operating almost like an annex of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, Francis’s Vatican has held a series of conferences and events that promote the rawest and most aggressive theories of climate change. As the ultra-left Nation has pointed out, even the Democrats are “to the right” of Pope Francis on the issue of climate change.1
His predecessors kept a prudent distance from day-to-day politics, especially on issues wholly unrelated to faith and morals. But Pope Francis has plunged into them on all matters environmental. He sees himself as a lobbyist for the left’s anti–fossil fuels agenda. In this role, he had no reservations about using his papal office to promote a climate change treaty at the UN’s Paris conference in 2015.
“In a few days’ time an important meeting on climate change will be held in Paris, where the international community as such will once again confront these issues. It would be sad, and I dare say even catastrophic, were particular interests to prevail over the common good and lead to manipulating information in order to protect their own plans and projects,” he said.2
He mocked a previous UN conference on the environment for not adopting more extreme plans to combat climate change. “Let’s hope that governments will be more courageous in Paris than they were in Lima,” Pope Francis complained to reporters on his plane during a 2015 trip to the Philippines.3
In December 2015, Catholics didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the Vatican used the façade of St. Peter’s Basilica as a movie screen for a propagandistic “climate change awareness” film—and did so on a holy day, no less.4
“Many enjoyed the spectacle, but equally many others found it highly inappropriate. What caused most of the consternation was that one of Christianity’s most sacred and iconic buildings was used as the backdrop to climate change advocacy—a science that remains highly contested—on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception,” reported Vatican correspondent Edward Pentin. “The event was part-sponsored by the World Bank, well known for its promotion of abortion and contraception.”
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, a Vatican official, acknowledged that climate change activists had asked to use St. Peter’s Basilica as a backdrop for the film in order to push the UN’s climate change conference in Paris.
“The evening of December 8th will conclude in Saint Peter’s Piazza with a meaningful and unique presentation entitled ‘Fiat lux: Illuminating Our Common Home.’ It will be a projection of photographs onto the façade and cupola of Saint Peter’s, taken from a repertoire of some of the world’s great photographers. These illuminations will present images inspired of mercy, of humanity, of the natural world, and of climate changes,” Fisichella told the press.
“The show is sponsored by the World Bank Group (Connect4Climate), by Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Productions, by the Li Ka-shing Foundation and by Okeanos. This event, inspired by the most recent encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato si’, is intended to present the beauty of creation, especially on the occasion of the Twenty-first United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop 21), which began in Paris last Monday, November 30, and ends on December 11. The show will begin at 19:00. I can assure everyone that it is a unique event for its genre and for the fact that it is being displayed for the first time on such a significant backdrop.”5
Never had the global left’s use of the Vatican as a propaganda tool been more blatant. Once wary of the Vatican, environmentalists now rejoice openly at their unprecedented access to it and the bully pulpit that Pope Francis has offered them. Many of these environmentalists are anti-Catholic Marxists who support aggressive forms of population control.
Angering the faithful, Pope Francis consulted with the rabid environmentalist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber before writing his environmental encyclical Laudato Si’.6 Despite pushing radical population control advocacy to “protect the Earth,” Schellnhuber was appointed by Pope Francis to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Schellnhuber has said that if climate change goes unchecked, the “carrying capacity of the planet” will fall “below 1 billion.” Among his many controversial positions is one that calls for a world government with an “Earth Constitution,” a “Global Council,” and a “Planetary Court.” Schellnhuber was selected by Pope Francis to be one of four presenters at the press conference for the release of Laudato Si’.
The Canadian socialist activist Naomi Klein was also tapped by Pope Francis for advice. She said, “When I was first asked to speak at a Vatican press conference on Pope Francis’s recently published climate-change encyclical, Laudato Si’, I was convinced that the invitation would soon be rescinded.” But she discovered that Francis’s Vatican agreed with her view that “climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model.”
Klein has marveled at how Pope Francis “is overturning centuries of theological interpretation,” and she has bragged about all the radicals like her now happily ensconced within the walls of the Vatican. In the pages of the New Yorker, she described how fun it was to hang out at the Vatican with fellow radicals who had helped Pope Francis draft Laudato Si’:
My dinner companions have been some of biggest troublemakers within the Church for years, the ones taking Christ’s proto-socialist teachings seriously. Patrick Carolan, the Washington, D.C.-based executive director of the Franciscan Action Network, is one of them. Smiling broadly, he tells me that, at the end of his life, Vladimir Lenin supposedly said that what the Russian Revolution had really needed was not more Bolsheviks but ten St. Francises of Assisi.
Now, all of a sudden, these outsiders share many of their views with the most powerful Catholic in the world, the leader of a flock of 1.2 billion people. Not only did this Pope surprise everyone by calling himself Francis, as no Pope ever had before him, but he appears to be determined to revive the most radical Franciscan teachings. Moema de Miranda, a powerful Brazilian social leader, who was wearing a wooden Franciscan cross, says that it feels “as if we are finally being heard.”
For [Fr. Sean] McDonagh, the changes at the Vatican are even more striking. “The last time I had a Papal audience was 1963,” he tells me over spaghetti vongole. “I let three Popes go by.” And yet here he is, back in Rome, having helped draft the most talked-about encyclical anyone can remember.7
Another radical leftist to whom Pope Francis turned for advice on the environment is Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s leading cheerleaders for abortion and government-run contraceptive programs.8 Sachs, an adviser to the United Nations, has written that killing unborn children is a “lower-risk and lower-cost option” than population growth. The chancellor for the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorono, sits on the Leadership Council of Sachs’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In 2016, Sánchez Sorono invited Sachs to accompany Bernie Sanders to the Vatican.9
The once-condemned liberation theologian Leonardo Boff has said that Pope Francis turned to him for advice on how to redesign the United Nations to fight climate change. Boff said that the pope asked for his input in a unique way: “Indirectly, through the ambassador of Argentina to the Vatican, I was asked by the Pope to send him material about ecology. He said: ‘Do not send it to the Vatican, because they will not deliver it to me. Send it to the ambassador who will place it in my hands. Otherwise they will make a sotto sedere, they will sit on it and forget to deliver it.’”10
Boff said that the pope “asked for a document that I helped to write, which would be a new configuration of the United Nations,” in which he “elaborated a whole conception of a unified planet that distributes the few resources we have in a decent and egalitarian way.”
Pope Francis also consulted with Timothy Wirth, an undersecretary of state under President Bill Clinton who was famous for decorating his Christmas trees with condoms, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, an advocate for population control measures. “We’ve never seen a pope do anything like this,” Wirth enthused. “No single individual has as much global sway as he does.”11
The Vatican’s red carpet was unfurled for officials of the Obama administration as well. Gina McCarthy, the head of Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, turned up in 2014 to tell Pope Francis that Obama appreciated his green activism.12 “I think the pope knows his own beliefs,” she said. “I want him to know that the president is aligned with him on these issues and that we are taking action in the United States.”
Vatican officials gave McCarthy a tour of the Holy See’s solar panels and environmentally conscious air filtration system in the Sistine Chapel. McCarthy made a revealing comment to the press during her visit about the propagandistic power of a green pope. He can depoliticize the issue for climate change activists, she said. “One of the challenges that I think we face in the U.S. is that climate change is very often viewed as a political issue,” said McCarthy. “And environmental issues are not political. I think we need to get this out of the political arena and get it back to the arena we work most effectively on: What’s right for our kids, for our families, for public health, and what solutions do we bring to the table that are going to address those?”
McCarthy was oblivious to the irony of Democrats calling for a pope to decide the debate, given the frequency with which they call for a “separation of church and state.” Suddenly a close relationship between church and state didn’t look so worrisome to liberals. “The faith community’s voice is going to be very important here because EPA can talk about the science and reach only so far,” she said. “We need to get this to the point where people are as comfortable talking about this as they are other international public health threats.”
“Everybody is just looking for the pope to continue to make signals that this is an issue that is important to the Catholic Church and should be important to all of us,” said McCarthy. She praised the Catholic Climate Covenant, which is a network of Catholic dioceses, organizations, and schools dedicated to climate change activism.13
Pope Francis also made time to meet with actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who gave Francis a book containing a painting that depicts “overpopulation” and other “excesses” on the planet.14
Pope Francis often describes himself as a “man of dialogue,” but he took no interest in dialoging with global warming skeptics, such as Marc Morano of the Heartland Institute. When he appeared at a 2015 Vatican summit on climate change to ask a question, a security guard shut him down, saying, “You have to control yourself or you will be escorted out of here.”15
“It wasn’t a summit,” says Morano in an interview for this book. “It was more like a rebranding party for the Church and the United Nations to merge on climate change. No dissent was going to be tolerated.”
“It was a real culture shock,” he recalls. “The pope was aligning himself with the most anti-Catholic radicals around, people who want to tear down the Church.”
Francis’s encyclical on the environment, the first ever written by a pope, was released in May 2015. Its section on climate change turned out to be as radical as conservatives feared. It uncritically drew upon the assumptions and doomsday rhetoric of the warmists.
“It was a cut-and-paste job from the documents of the United Nations,” says the physicist Dr. Tom Sheahen in an interview for this book.
The pope made it clear that he was advancing a temporal political goal. He addressed the document to everybody “on the planet” and endorsed the specific climate change initiatives of the United Nations. The encyclical rests on the false premise that resistance to the claims of environmentalism are equivalent to mistreatment of God’s creation. What the pope presents as a moral crisis is in fact nothing more than a political dispute. In the encyclical’s most controversial sections, Pope Francis treats global warming theory as ironclad fact and gives his blessing to all of the “solutions” proposed by the environmental left to control the climate:
A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.
The passages in the document touching on global warming read like a hybrid of Marx’s Das Kapital and Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance. “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades,” he wrote.
“Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years,” he asserted, adopting a Malthusian tone. He said the earth was becoming an “immense pile of filth.” He offered an absurdly one-sided treatment of technology, free markets, and consumerism, conveniently ignoring all of the evidence that those developments had alleviated poverty, improved health, and raised standards of living.
He endorsed a “true world political authority” to enforce “global regulatory norms,” saying that “it is remarkable how weak international political responses have been.” He called for the phasing out of fossil fuels: “We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels—especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas—needs to be progressively replaced without delay. Until greater progress is made in developing widely accessible sources of renewable energy, it is legitimate to choose the less harmful alternative or to find short-term solutions.”
The document is riddled with half-truths and scattershot generalizations, many of which come from deep-seated prejudices against capitalism. He wrote, “The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property. Saint John Paul II forcefully reaffirmed this teaching, stating that God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring anyone.”
In fact, Pope John Paul II had defended the free market, saying “Christ does not condemn a simple possession of material goods. Rather, his most severe words are directed against those who use their riches in an egoistic manner, without preoccupying with their neighbor who lacks the indispensable.”
No such balance appeared in Laudato Si’. Instead, perfectly reasonable human activity, such as turning on air-conditioning, is cast as overconsumption:
People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning. The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.
Many found this a curious example of overconsumption, given that the lives of millions of people have been saved or improved by air-conditioning. The culture of “overconsumption” and “waste” against which the pope rails has contributed to longer and healthier lives for the poor.
Openly endorsing the anti-growth policies of the Left, Pope Francis cast economic decline in the West as a requirement of justice: “We know how unsustainable is the behavior of those who constantly consume and destroy, while others are not yet able to live in a way worthy of their human dignity. That is why the time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world, in order to provide resources for other places to experience healthy growth.”
Socialists found his searing critique of Western capitalism exhilarating. To the Brazilian socialist sociologist Michael Löwy, no pope had ever denounced capitalism so directly. “For Pope Francis, ecological disasters and climate change are not merely the results of individual behavior, but rather the result of the current models of production and consumption,” he said.16
The encyclical represented a departure from the pope’s normally tolerant attitudes toward the “modern world.” On disputed cultural matters, he approaches the modern world very gingerly. “The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is—these complaints sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defense. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today,” he has said. That attitude vanishes in Laudato Si’, which amounts to a jeremiad against the modern world.
Addressing a subject on which he enjoys no expertise and that has no bearing on the salvation of souls, he sounded more like Noam Chomsky than St. Francis of Assisi. Adopting the grim faux-scientific tone of Marx, Pope Francis writes in the encyclical:
Production is not always rational, and is usually tied to economic variables which assign to products a value that does not necessarily correspond to their real worth. This frequently leads to an overproduction of some commodities, with unnecessary impact on the environment and with negative results on regional economies.
No serious economist today gives any credence to such warmed-over Marxist claims. Pope Francis asserts that a free market, because it allows for income inequalities, is not only a threat to the environment but also a cause of war—a link that even the left-leaning Economist finds “ultra-radical.” It perplexes the Economist that Pope Francis “consciously or unconsciously follows Vladimir Lenin in his diagnosis of capitalism and imperialism as the main reason why world war broke out a century ago.”17
Pope Francis has admitted that his knowledge of economics is thin. “I don’t understand it very well,” he once said.18 But that didn’t stop him in the encyclical from offering highly specific economic prescriptions.
As a number of economists and political analysts noted, the encyclical, if followed, would hurt the very poor people its advice purports to help.
“Pope Francis—and I say this as a Catholic—is a complete disaster when it comes to his policy pronouncements. On the economy, and now on the environment, the pope has allied himself with the far left and has embraced an ideology that would make people poorer and less free,” wrote the economist Stephen Moore. “The pope recently declared: ‘The monopolizing of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness.’ This is the language of the radical green movement that is at its core anti-Christian, anti-human being and anti-progress. He has aligned himself with a secular movement that is antithetical to the fundamental theological underpinning of Catholicism—the sanctity of human life and the value of all souls.”19
“Pope Francis frames his argument in favor of a heavy-handed environmentalism around the idea that climate change hurts the poor the most. Yet he seems to have little notion of what has helped the world’s poor more than anything: namely, the march of markets and technology, which has lifted billions out of destitution,” wrote Steven Malanga. “As Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute and co-author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto, observed: ‘When [the] Pope speaks of ‘irrational faith in human progress’ I want him to visit the Congo to see what life is like when there is no progress.’”20
Cardinal Peter Turkson, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, has been credited with writing one of the encyclical’s first drafts. Turkson is famous for his over-the-top pronouncements against capitalism. Among the other papers that have been issued by his pontifical council is one that calls for a “global public authority” to correct the “distortions of capitalist development.”21
Pope Francis has made it clear that he agrees with Turkson’s support for world government. “Interdependence obliges us to think of one world with a common plan,” he writes in the encyclical. “It is essential to devise stronger and more efficiently organized international institutions, with functionaries who are appointed fairly by agreement among national governments, and empowered to impose sanctions.”
In August 2016, the Vatican announced that Turkson would head up a new Vatican department dedicated to promoting environmentalism and other politically liberal projects described as “Integral Human Development.” Pope Francis said that Turkson’s dicastery would focus on “migrants, those in need, the sick, the excluded and marginalized, the imprisoned and the unemployed, as well as victims of armed conflict, natural disasters, and all forms of slavery and torture.”22
In many dioceses, the Church has gone intensely green under Francis. Rosary groups have given way to recycling clubs, and priests are more likely to question Catholics for their “carbon footprint” than their abortions. It is now common to see “justice and peace” diocesan offices calling on Catholics to “go vegetarian,” “take shorter showers,” and “use both sides of paper.” In March 2016, the governorate of the Vatican City State announced that it was going to “repurpose” the floral arrangements from the Easter Mass and announced that it would set up an “ecological island” at the Vatican to serve as a compost station for waste. To promote “climate change awareness” on March 19, Pope Francis ordered the cupola of St. Peter’s Basilica and Bernini’s colonnade to go dark for an hour and urged the faithful to turn off all nonessential lights.23
Eyeing the Church’s enormous resources, environmentalists have convinced many Catholics organizations to divest from coal, oil, and gas companies and to go solar. In the Philippines, thousands of Catholics, led by their bishops, marched against fossil fuels. The 2016 event was organized by Greenpeace and other radical groups.24
The coordination between the environmental left and the Church has never been more obvious, with environmentalists putting out memes about the need for Catholic institutions to “free” themselves from fossil fuels. That such efforts will increase unemployment doesn’t seem to disturb a pope who claims unemployment as one of his key issues. Nor does he feel any reservations about using the donations he has inherited from previous generations for an overtly political cause. Catholics have donated to the Church over the years on the assumption that that money would go to the promotion of the Catholic faith, not end up in an ideological slush fund directed by activists like Jeffrey Sachs.
The Vatican is now looking at making classes in “ecology” a requirement for all seminarians. Many seminaries across the world have already adopted such classes, in light of the pope’s call that “seminaries and houses of formation will provide an education in responsible simplicity of life.”
According to La Stampa, “Seven Catholic seminaries offer courses on faith and ecology.” In the US, they are the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago; Catholic University of America: School of Theology and Religious Studies in Washington D.C.; Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas; Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity at Saint Thomas University in St Paul, Minnesota, it reported. “The Pontifical universities in Rome that have introduced such courses include the Gregorian University, St. Anselmo and the Salesian Pontifical University.”25
In September 2016, Pope Francis stunned Catholics by suggesting that environmentalism be added to the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. In a message on the “world day of prayer for the care of creation,” he wrote:
The Christian life involves the practice of the traditional seven corporal and seven spiritual works of mercy. “We usually think of the works of mercy individually and in relation to a specific initiative: hospitals for the sick, soup kitchens for the hungry, shelters for the homeless, schools for those to be educated, the confessional and spiritual direction for those needing counsel and forgiveness… But if we look at the works of mercy as a whole, we see that the object of mercy is human life itself and everything it embraces.”
Obviously “human life itself and everything it embraces” includes care for our common home. So let me propose a complement to the two traditional sets of seven: may the works of mercy also include care for our common home.
As a spiritual work of mercy, care for our common home calls for a “grateful contemplation of God’s world” (Laudato Si’, 214) which “allows us to discover in each thing a teaching which God wishes to hand on to us” (ibid., 85). As a corporal work of mercy, care for our common home requires “simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness” and “makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world” (ibid., 230–231).
He also said that Catholics should go to confession if they fail to uphold the injunctions of environmentalism:
After a serious examination of conscience and moved by sincere repentance, we can confess our sins against the Creator, against creation, and against our brothers and sisters. “The Catechism of the Catholic Church presents the confessional as the place where the truth makes us free.” We know that “God is greater than our sin,” than all our sins, including those against the environment. We confess them because we are penitent and desire to change. The merciful grace of God received in the sacrament will help us to do so.
Examining our consciences, repentance and confession to our Father who is rich in mercy lead to a firm purpose of amendment. This in turn must translate into concrete ways of thinking and acting that are more respectful of creation. For example: “avoiding the use of plastic and paper, reducing water consumption, separating refuse, cooking only what can reasonably be consumed, showing care for other living beings, using public transport or car-pooling, planting trees, turning off unnecessary lights, or any number of other practices” (Laudato Si’, 211). We must not think that these efforts are too small to improve our world. They “call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread” and encourage “a prophetic and contemplative lifestyle, one capable of deep enjoyment free of the obsession with consumption” (ibid., 212, 222).
After Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency, Cardinal Joseph Tobin called on the U.S. bishops to increase their climate change activism, “given the possibility that the administration isn’t going to be very interested in the questions that Pope Francis is interested in.”26
Environmentalists often chafed under the rhetoric of Pope John Paul II, who decried the left’s “culture of death,” and Pope Benedict XVI, who described its politics as a “dictatorship of relativism.” But Pope Francis has avoided those phrases. Environmentalists have breathed easier knowing that any opposition from Francis’s Vatican on contested moral issues will be minimal. At the beginning of the papacy, they cheered his comment that the Church is too “obsessed” with abortion and artificial birth control—stances that environmentalists regard as a major obstacle to their climate change agenda. In Earth in the Balance, Al Gore wrote that environmentalists support a “Global Marshall Plan” with “fertility management” at the core of the plan—fertility management being a euphemism for widespread abortions and ubiquitous government-regulated contraceptive use.27
Francis’s predecessors unequivocally condemned the sexual revolution, but he has been far more elliptical on the subject. While he hasn’t promoted the population control agenda of the Al Gores, he does allow himself heterodox musings from time to time that undercut the Church’s opposition to it.
In early 2015, for example, Francis appalled conservative Catholics with large families, and delighted environmentalists who call for small families, when he told the press that Catholics shouldn’t “be like rabbits.”28 “Good Catholics,” he said, should practice “responsible parenthood.” Catholic married couples who conscientiously follow the Church’s prohibition on artificial birth control were aghast, and even liberal Catholics acknowledged that Pope Francis had adopted a startlingly novel line. “As a Catholic, it’s kinda shocking to hear @Pontifiex say, ‘Catholics must not breed like rabbits.’ Really?” tweeted CNN anchor Carol Costello.29
Nor could conservative Catholics believe their ears when Pope Francis expanded on his remark by recalling the time he rebuked one of his parishioners—a mother who had had seven children by caesarean sections—for “tempting God.” She was guilty of “irresponsibility,” he said.30
Past popes quoted the scriptural admonition “Be fruitful and multiply,” but Pope Francis has sent mixed signals on family size. In recent decades, the size of families for many Catholics has shrunk—a trend with which Pope Francis appears comfortable. Around the time he was telling Catholic couples not to be like “rabbits,” he pointed to a finding of modern demographers: “I believe that three children per family, from what the experts say, is the key number for sustaining the population.”31
The British Catholic organization Voice of the Family expressed concern that Laudato Si’ omitted any traditional defense of the Church’s teaching on artificial birth control. Voice of the Family official Maria Madise noted that at a time when “contraception and environmentalism so often go hand-in-hand” Pope Francis declined to reaffirm “Church teaching on the primacy of procreation.” The organization has also expressed concern that Pope Francis’s representatives to the United Nations are consenting to the UN agenda in favor of abortion and free contraception.
“There has been extensive collaboration between other Holy See bodies and powerful proponents of abortion, contraception and population control during the current pontificate, under the guise of promoting sustainable development,” according to the group. It points in particular to a 2016 speech in which Monsignor Jean-Marie Mupendawatu, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, endorsed the UN’s sustainable development goals, even though one of them is “universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services.”32
In his post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis makes passing mention of Humanae Vitae without quoting its direction condemnations of artificial birth control. He also belittles the Church for its past teaching on marriage: “we often present marriage in such a way that its unitive meaning, its call to grow in love and its ideal of mutual assistance are overshadowed by an almost exclusive insistence on the duty of procreation.”
Where his predecessors condemned artificial birth control in all cases as an “intrinsically disordered” act, Pope Francis has said that it is permissible under certain circumstances. On a flight back from Mexico in 2016, he approved of contraceptive use by women infected with the Zika virus.33 In the course of his remarks, he falsely claimed that Pope Paul VI had approved of contraceptive use in the 1960s by missionaries in Africa who were in danger of rape. This falsehood was pointed out to Francis’s press secretary, but he didn’t bother to clarify the pope’s remark. He just reiterated it: “So contraceptives or condoms, especially in cases of emergency and seriousness, may also be the subject of a serious conscience discernment. This is what the pope said.”34
Once again, the situation ethics of the Church’s first Jesuit pope confused the faithful and gratified the Church’s critics, who gleefully observed that if contraceptive use is justified for Zika, then the pope must surely also condone it for the even deadlier AIDS virus.
The first radical green pope is also impressing the environmental left with his support for Darwinism. Leading Darwinists have called mainstream evolutionary theory—which holds that species form as a result of random mutations and natural selection—the “greatest engine of atheism ever invented,” insofar as it provides a creation story without a creator.35 Understanding the atheistic implications of the theory, the Church has long viewed Darwinism with suspicion. But Pope Francis doesn’t. In the contemporary clash between Darwinism and “intelligent design,” Pope Francis sides with the Darwinists.
Pope Francis has lectured Catholics on the need to embrace a conception of God that comports with Darwinian theory. “Pope Francis: God is not ‘a magician, with a magic wand,’” ran a headline in October 2014. Reporters noted that his deference to Darwinism represents a significant “rhetorical break” with his predecessors.36
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Pope Francis said in a speech before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. “[God] created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”
Pope Francis, from time to time, indicates that he doesn’t share the Church’s traditional understanding of Christ’s miracles, a position explained by his exaggerated respect for the rationalism of modern science and his weakness for trendy currents within modern biblical scholarship. For example, Pope Francis has interpreted Christ’s miracle of the loaves and fishes as nothing more than a metaphor. On multiple occasions, he has said that the “miracle” wasn’t a physical event but a lesson of “sharing” that Christ had imparted to the crowd, which inspired them to take food out that they were hoarding and give it to those nearby. He has called it a “parable” and that it was “not magic or sorcery.” In one homily he said, “Jesus managed to generate a current among his followers: they all went on sharing what was their own, turning it into a gift for the others; and that is how they all got to eat their fill. Incredibly, food was left over: they collected it in seven baskets.”
That sermon, as one priest put it, “leaves us to draw the inescapable conclusion that, along with so many modern historical-critical biblical scholars, he has taken on board the well-known, century-old rationalistic ‘demythologization’ of this Gospel miracle. So we are left to wonder what other miracles of Jesus he may think require the same treatment.”37
For Vatican officials these days, theistic Darwinism, even though it remains a contested theory, is treated like catastrophic man-made global warming—as unquestionably factual. (Pope Francis’s chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has ludicrously said that the pope’s support for the global warming claims carries the same moral and magisterial weight as the Church’s opposition to abortion.38) The number two official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Archbishop Augustine Di Noia, said at a lecture in New York City in 2016 that “we can’t ignore what evolutionary science is telling us.” But Fr. Michael Chaberek, a Dominican and author of Catholicism and Evolution: A History from Darwin to Pope Francis, believes that Pope Francis and his aides are sowing “confusion” on the issue by treating Darwinism as a fact. He argues that this unwarranted deference to Darwinian science threatens to corrupt the Church’s understanding of creation and the doctrine of Original Sin.
“Even in the seminaries and theological departments, the classic theological treatise ‘On Creation’ (De Deo Creante or De Creatione) has been replaced with the teaching about different science-faith models and vague speculations about ‘God working entirely through secondary causes,’” he has said. “In Biblical scholarship the historical and literal meaning of Genesis (1–3) was abandoned, giving place to all kinds of reductive interpretations. But new science shows how little the Darwinian mechanism can actually accomplish.”39
In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis makes admiring mention of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Darwinist who was disgraced by his association with Piltdown Man, an “early human discovery” that turned out to be a hoax. The writings of Teilhard were repeatedly censured by the Church. But Francis cites him as an impeccably orthodox source, writing in Laudato Si’ of his “contribution” to the Church’s understanding of creation.40
A scientist interviewed for this book called Pope Francis’s slavish adherence to “unfettered Darwinism” a “cover-your-ass strategy” designed to placate a Western elite quick to call the Church anti-science.
Like the climate change activists, the Darwinists see the pope’s support as a propaganda coup and have incorporated it into their politics. “The Pope would like you to accept evolution,” intones Smithsonian Magazine.41 In 2016, in keeping with his enthusiastic embrace of Darwinism, Pope Francis lifted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s sanction on a scholar, Ariel Álvarez Valdés, who denies the historicity of Adam and Eve.
By placing the Church at the front of the left’s environmentalist juggernaut, Pope Francis has become a superstar in the eyes of the Western intelligentsia. But many Catholics in the pews view it as one more frivolous abuse of his authority. On the moral issues a pope should address, he falls silent. On contentious political issues, he couldn’t be more voluble.
A study released by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2016 suggested that the pope’s encyclical on global warming had left faithful Catholics and non-Catholics cold. Texas Tech professor Nan Li, who led the study, concluded, “While Pope Francis’s environmental call may have increased some individuals’ concerns about climate change, it backfired with conservative Catholics and non-Catholics, who not only resisted the message but defended their pre-existing beliefs by devaluing the pope’s credibility on climate change.”42 “The Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters,” said Australian cardinal George Pell, in an implicit rebuke to the pope’s environmentalism.43
In his attempt to pressure Catholics into embracing the radical green movement, Pope Francis is creating needless divisions within the Church, handing a propaganda tool to her moral enemies, and exposing the Church to future embarrassment when the “science” behind global warming claims is discredited. Where other popes sought to save souls, he prefers the more fashionable cause of “saving the planet.”