Since 2010, there have been faint indicators that the Papacy was thinking about promoting a weekly day of rest to combat Global Warming. This idea was first hinted at when Pope Benedict spoke to the E.U. labor unions in Denmark. He suggested that a weekly day of rest might be simultaneously good for the workers AND for the planet. Fast forward to 2019.
Charles Camosy is an Associate Professor at the Department of Theology at The Jesuit University of New York, namely Fordham University. Three days ago, Camosy authored an article in the The Salt Lake Tribune, titled Heeding Pope Francis’ eco-encyclical could pave way for Green New Deal.
In this article he argues that Pope Francis’ approach to climate change — one focused on culture — is far superior to moving immediately to legislative approaches like the recently floated Green New Deal. He says,
According to climate science experts, we have 12 years to dramatically curb our carbon emissions before we reach a tipping point, after which climate change is not only inevitable but also disastrous. In light of this emergency, I argued that we need to take the next decade or so to work on changing culture — and then, in the final few years, work to pass dramatic legislation in a changed cultural and political environment.
Right now, attempts to shove the Green New Deal down the throats of an unwilling public do little but push them further away from embracing the culture change we need.
Laws demand certain specific actions. “Culture change,” in addition to often being more difficult to name and define, takes more work and patience to bring about.
Citing Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, Camosy calls for members of society to “be motivated” to accept laws and regulations to fix climate change. He continues,
For laws to bring about the necessary long-term effects, “the majority of the members of society must be adequately motivated to accept them, and personally transformed to respond.”
Camosy rightly observes that the Pope is calling for a profound interior conversion, an “eco-conversion” if you will. Such a conversion, the Pope says, must be both individual and communal. But it must be a fundamental change of life — much like that of the saint best known for his spiritual emphasis on God’s creation, St. Francis of Assisi.
Are you listening to this? The Pope is calling for a spiritual conversion experience from the inhabitants of the earth. This is radical environmentalism on Jesuit steroids. Camosy continues,
We must also celebrate rest, especially from buying and selling, by returning to a focus on keeping the Sabbath.
As it did for St. Francis, Pope Francis argues that this kind of conversion can restore “ecological equilibrium, establishing harmony within ourselves, with others, with nature and other living creatures, and with God.”
What are they calling for here? Say it with me. “SUNDAY.”
They want religious institutions to work to help people cultivate a spiritual foundation that makes “ecological conversion” possible. And anyone who worries about the existential threat of global climate change (and there is a worldwide propaganda program going on to instill climate fear in adults, children and religious organizations) should do all they can to support religious institutions in this work. This is also the work of the United nations, in their 2030 Agenda.
Regretfully, certain individuals in the General Conference PARL department are helping to bring this kind of religious eco-conversion to pass. Ganoune Diop, for one, is working to bring about this new social fabric. This, in spite of the fact that the UN is consistently wrong in their predictions:
Pope Francis made it clear, that “seminaries and houses of formation” which can provide not only spiritual formation but “education in responsible simplicity of life”, must help in creating this new social fabric—itself the product of eco-conversion. Camosy continues,
These changes are not only necessary as part of the direct fight to lower carbon emissions. They also are the only real hope we have to change the culture so that one day we will all accept something like the Green New Deal.
They Have a Ten-year Goal.
Camosy ends his article with these chilling words.
Think 10 years isn’t enough time for such dramatic changes to take hold? You underestimate the power of changing hearts to bring about life-changing legislation. In 2004, GOP operatives put anti-same-sex marriage policies on state ballots to draw out voters who were opposed to the practice. By 2014, American culture had transformed so dramatically on gay and lesbian marriage that pushing legislation barring it would have been political suicide.
Our culture could also have an ecological conversation in a similar time frame. Perhaps even faster, given the new technologies. Let’s get to work.
Just nine years after 2010, we are seeing high-level theologians from New York Jesuit University openly admit that the Sabbath Commandment may be useful to further the global warming/climate change agenda. They want the global population to be ‘conditioned’ to request laws and regulations to ‘fix’ climate change. And they want to see it happen inside of ten years. And they want SUNDAY.
“We must also celebrate rest, especially from buying and selling, by returning to a focus on keeping the Sabbath” (Charlie Camosy, Department of Theology, Fordham University).
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Camosy’s Bio:
Camosy grew up in the cornfields of Wisconsin, but is grateful to be teaching in the Bronx. A theme running throughout his work is the fostering of intellectual solidarity between political and ethical approaches which find conversation difficult. A Roman Catholic anthropology which refuses to choose to between individually- and communally-construed understandings of personal dignity is particularly important in this regard.
He has put this intellectual solidarity into practice as the founding member of the organizing committee for an international conference designed to think and speak differently about abortion, the founder and co-director of the Catholic Conversation Project, an editor and contributor for catholicmoraltheology.com, and a board member of Democrats for Life.
Camosy is also on the board of the College Theology Society and the advisory board of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. He is thrilled to be a part of the international working group Contending Modernities which is spending four years exploring how Catholicism, Islam and Secular Liberalism can productively interact in the public sphere with regard to difficult ethical issues related to science and bioethics.
The Global Warming Hoax: It's About Socialism
For a decade I’ve been saying that the theory of man-made global warming is like a watermelon: green on the outside, red on the inside. Superficially it is about environmentalism, but at deeper level it is about central command of the economy—socialism.
Because if you can convince people that carbon dioxide will super-heat the planet and has to be carefully regulated, you can control every aspect of human existence, right down to breathing, because we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. You can control all aspects of power generation, commercial and residential construction, all aspects of transportation and the manufacture of vehicles, how warm or cool people can keep their houses, how far people may commute to work, all aspects of business and leisure travel, etc. The purported need to police carbon dioxide is the golden key that unlocks the door to centralized state control of every aspect of economic life.
The timing was a tip off, too. When did you first hear about the menace of man-made global warming? Wasn’t it in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and after “communist” China had begun turning to privately owned businesses to manufacture its exports? It was within a few years after socialism—common ownership of the means of production—was thoroughly discredited as a theory for organizing economies, and generally abandoned (except in Cuba and North Korea), that we began to hear about man-made global warming. The whole world having just witnessed the total debunking of socialism as an economic theory, the utopian totalitarians, which, like the poor, ye apparently have always with ye, needed a new excuse to control the economy and micro-manage everyone’s life.
Well, now you don’t have to accept this theory from me. It is out in the open. The proponents of the notion that your SUV is cooking the planet are not even pretending anymore. They’re just coming right out and admitting that the whole thing is about socialism.
At the Guardian, Phil McDuff’s column’s is headed, “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?” Climate change, McDuff informs us, the fault of private ownership of business:
“Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. [Green New Deal]-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below ‘absolutely catastrophic’ is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.”
So according to McDuff of the Guardian, if you want the planet to survive, you have to abandon capitalism, a method of economic organization that works well and has raised living standards throughout the world, and stratospherically in the West, and embrace socialism, which has failed utterly and miserably everywhere it has been tried, absolutely without exception.
Another recent article in the Guardian, by Jeff Sparrow asks, “Is socialism the Answer to the Climate Catastrophe?” and answers, yes, “there’s every reason to expect various versions of socialism to play an increasingly important role in discussions about the climate catastrophe.”
In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Kevin Baker spends a long article rhapsodizing about the Tennessee Valley Authority, and all the hydro-electric dams it built in the 1930s, as a preface for promoting the “Green New Deal.” Baker notes that even the New York Times is skeptical about the Green New Deal, writing:
“Is the Green New Deal aimed at addressing the climate crisis? Or is addressing the climate crisis merely cover for a wish-list of progressive policies and a not-so-subtle effort to move the Democratic Party to the Left? . . . Read literally, the resolution wants not only to achive a carbon-neutral energy system but also to transform the economy itself.”
“The answers to these questions,” writes Baker, “are yes and yes. We must address climate change, and we must transform the way our political and economic systems work in this country . . .” He concludes that the brilliance of the Green New Deal is in acknowledging that “we cannot go on as we have, not only in degrading the earth but also in degrading each other, through the existing economic system we have allowed to overrun us.”
Only someone who never lived in a socialist command economy, like Kevin Baker, could imagine that a free-market economy is more “degrading” than a centrally planned, socialist economy.
Those who lived through socialism are easily able to spot the Global Warming Hoax for what it is: an excuse for socialism. The former president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, stated in a 2011 speech in Australia:
"They want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. Therefore, what is in danger is freedom, not the climate."
Klaus, who spent much of his early life fighting the communist government of Czechoslovakia, admitted he is very sensitive to this issue. But "I am afraid that some of the people who spend their lives in a free society don't appreciate sufficiently all the issues connected with freedom. So my oversensitivity is like an alarm clock warning about the potential development, which I am really afraid of."
"I feel threatened now, not by global warming — I don't see any — (but) by the global-warming doctrine, which I consider a new dangerous attempt to control and mastermind my life and our lives, in the name of controlling the climate or temperature."
Klaus notes the great irony in this: that the socialists governments of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe were the worst polluters of all:
"They don't care about resources or poverty or pollution. They hate us, the humans. They consider us dangerous and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world called communism. And I know it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced."
If the socialist loons are no longer pretending, I don’t see any need to pretend any longer, either. The great Man-Made Gobal Warming Hoax is nonsense. The pope supports it because he seeks to leverage climate hysteria into an international Sunday law. But the rest of us should decry it for what it is and always has been—a socialist stratagem.