This weekend marked the first Sunday in Advent, one of two penitential seasons for Catholics. Lent is the other penitential season, and it is closely related in that we are awaiting the coming of Christ during both times. In the gospel readings during Mass this weekend, we heard of the “natural phenomena and calamitous reactions in the world prior to the coming of the Son of Man with power and great glory.” In other words, according to the gospels, Christ’s return will be in the midst of great upheavals in the physical environment.
What kind of upheavals in the environment, you ask? Well, in a special letter to parishioners this weekend, Bishop Libasci explains what is meant by the upheavals, while also counseling us Catholics to not be perplexed by the “changing atmospheric conditions and the changes in the sea”. The upheavals all sound strangely akin to the mantra about global climate change recited by the environmentalist crowd, yet there is a twist to this message. The Bishop further counsels us to not “die of fright” over these–and other–environmental changes. He says we shouldn’t fear them.
Contrast those above statements with the Pope’s Encyclical released in May, the Laudato Si, in which the Pope severely admonishes us for causing global climate change through our careless stewardship of mother earth. From the Pope’s Encyclical:
“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.”
Let’s leave aside the fact that the global climate change debate is intensely controversial, maybe now more than ever. Critics—including me, with a Bachelor’s degree in “Renewable Natural Resources”– have concluded that a political bias exists in many of the so-called data “proving” humanity as the cause of a negligible climate change. As much as the media will scream that it is “settled science”, it isn’t. (A true scientist will readily admit that there is no such thing as settled science, but I digress.)
So why does the Church wade so deeply into this fraught pool, and in so contradictory of a fashion? On the one hand, the Pope tells us that global climate change is an unnecessary evil perpetrated on the earth by uncaring and wasteful humans; on the other, the Bishop says it is a sign that we should prepare ourselves for the second coming of Christ, and not to fear it.
In my mind, this is yet another example, (just like economics!), that the Church is flagrantly tipping its hand, politically speaking. As a conservative Catholic, I am of a dying breed. Yet I continue to pray that the Church would simply stick to its purview and not make sweeping and paradoxical pronouncements that do nothing but confuse the parishioners, fuel rumors of a possible schism, and reveal a leftist social-justice bent.
