Colby Cosh
Tuesday, Jun. 23, 2015
Pope Francis links climate change and poverty. Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images
There’s an old saying about the way the Vicar of Christ is chosen by the Roman Catholic church: “Thin pope, fat pope.” The adjectives are not literal, although sometimes the church has appeared to act as though they were. The idea is that the big job alternates between subtle, power-brokering intellectuals and sweet-natured, avuncular populists. You choose a “thin” pope to get things done and establish theological rigour. Then an exemplary “fat” pope, to consolidate the love of the faithful.
Pope Francis, with his instinct for humble gestures and his attractive self-denial, is the fattest (phattest?) of fat popes. As a bishop he was famous for riding the city bus to work in Buenos Aires. He still wears the pectoral cross he came into the papacy with, and refuses to wear fancy vestments, or even to live in the really nice four-star papal apartments. He is hardly ever seen wearing the papal mitre (that’s the tall headgear everybody thinks of as a “pope hat”) and has mused about discarding it altogether.
On June 18, though, he almost seemed to set a new standard for regular-guy-ness when his official Twitter account let loose with a machine-gun rattle of short quotations from his new papal encyclical about the environment, Laudato Si’. Note that the letter has a vulgar-language title — an Umbrian lyric taken from the Pope’s namesake, Francis of Assisi — which is how Popes signal that they want to roll up their sleeves and get all worldly.
I say “quotations” out of instinctive respect, but one is tempted to say “quips.” Whoever is in charge of @Pontifexstarted dishing tweets like some layabout ex-journalist tweaking on Red Bull. And come to think of it, that is probably exactly the sort of person who was handling the task. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” the Holy Father’s social-media personification rapped. “We have to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”
The present world system is certainly unsustainable from a number of points of view. #LaudatoSi
— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) June 18, 2015
Russell Brand or Supreme Pontiff?
As an atheist, I’m afraid my instinctive reaction to the pope’s zingers is that an awful lot of the places on Earth where people live literally on piles of filth happen, by some tragic coincidence, to be predominantly Catholic. Still, I wanted to give the full encyclical a chance. Laudato Si’, when not chopped up into theology McNuggets, creates a very different impression, alternating between personal observations and dreary, committee-written boilerplate.
Non-Catholics responded positively to the Pope’s tweetstorm because he seemed to be taking a firm position on climate change, and the letter certainly does that. But the head of the Catholic religion turns out to be no more capable of expressing himself compactly on one important issue than is the typical adherent of the Environmentalist religion.
The climate is a “common good,” says the Pope, and there is “a very solid scientific consensus” that it is changing in “disturbing” ways. Hooray for Science Pope! But before you know it he is weighing in on drinking water. “…in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market.” It turns out this is bad, even though almost any economist alive would instantly apply a red pencil and several question marks to that “despite.”
Before long Francis is going off on “Decline in the Quality of Human Life and the Breakdown of Society.” Hilariously, there’s a warning about new digital media, presumably in forms like … er, Twitter? They “[give] rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature,” quoth @Pontifex.
AFP Photo / Alberto Pizzoli Pope Francis
One begins to suspect that this ordinary-Joe pope may lack even the ordinary Joe’s normal quantum of irony. The confirmation comes in the section of the encyclical on “Global Inequality,” and, yes, we are wandering pretty far now from atmosphere physics. After a brief discussion of the global poor, the Holy Father gets defensive. “Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different,” he says, “some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate.”
I hear you saying “Not a bad idea, Pope!” Well, surprise: he is not having it. “To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.” It turns out you are actually doing harm if you think handing out condoms and IUDs can help poor countries become more self-sufficient and liberate their women.
There is a lot more of this, and I must confess that by the time I got some way into the chapter on “The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” the encyclical was no longer reminding me of Russell Brand: it was reminding me of the Unabomber Manifesto. That is, of course, a little unfair. Ted Kaczynski is responsible for nowhere near as much injury to human welfare as the Catholic Church inflicts every 15 minutes, and, besides, he’s a better writer. Still, you tell me with a straight face that some of this stuff doesn’t remind you of good old Ted. Here’s a big hunk:
Unabomber or Unapapa?
“The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same.”
Pure Kaczynski, yeah? The next sentence could easily be “So that’s why I moved to a cabin in the woods and started mailing bombs to scientists.” Let me give you another: Unabomber or Unapapa?
“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behaviour that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being.”
Climate change represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. #LaudatoSi
— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) June 18, 2015
That one’s Ted — or have I switched them? No, despite the stylistic similarities, the parallel quotes, which could be multiplied greatly, does reveal a weakness in my insolent comparison. The Pope is an optimist, and thinks technology can be tamed if human hearts turn to Christ in time. Kaczynski thinks the problems involved in technological progress are inherent. He specifically argues that they cannot be solved by religion, real or contrived.
Although Science Pope does not have the equivalent of a degree in science — many of his non-Catholic supporters seem to have thought otherwise — he did work as a chem-lab technician as a young man. In that capacity he could easily have been the target of an Argentine version of the Unabomber. Fortunately, he escaped to glory.
National Post
Posted in: Full Comment Tags: Pope Francis, Religion, Roman Catholicism, Russell Brand, Ted Kaczynski
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