Italian cardinal: Laudato Si’ comparable in importance to Rerum Novarum
August 21, 2015
In a front-page article in L’Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti of Perugia-Città della Pieve said that Pope Francis’s new encyclical on care for our common home is comparable to Pope Leo XIII’s groundbreaking social encyclical Rerum Novarum.
The cardinal writes that in 1891, Pope Leo turned “the maternal gaze of the Church” to the labor question during the crucial transition from an agricultural society to the industrial revolution.
We now live in a similarly crucial time of transition, Cardinal Bassetti continued, one predicted by Father Romano Guardini in The End of the Modern World, in which a “non-human man” claims limitless dominance over nature and an “economic, technical, organizational state” asserts limitless power over humanity and creation.
The most important challenge of Laudato Si’, then, is the challenge to the “ungovernable power” of the “techno-economic paradigm.”
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Posted by: aclune9083 -
Aug. 22, 2015 11:11 PM ET USA
Peel back the rhetoric and see that the advisers, who filled in the blanks for the Holy Father on how man's activities have supposedly exacerbated the cyclical nature of changes in climate, have ignored the contrary evidence. The document accepts uncritically the seriously flawed arguments of the climate-change alarmists while ignoring the solid, peer-reviewed scientific evidence to the contrary. If the Holy Father is going to pontificate on social policy, he needs to get the facts right.
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Posted by: filioque -
Aug. 21, 2015 11:23 PM ET USA
Then why does the encyclical recommend a world authority to police the response to climate change? This is playing right into the hands of the power-hungry technocrats, not to mention the same old crowd of population control, abortion-loving humanity haters, many of whom have apparently taken up residence at the Vatican and were even recruited to present the encyclical to the world. Shame, shame, shame.
