Laudato Si' And The Full Week Of Conservative Freakout It Provoked Down Under

[hatrack]

There are few events in the Australian media as simultaneously sad and hilarious as an extended tantrum from the Australian. While our national broadsheet’s recent focus has been on confecting outrage about Q&A, its hysterical response to Pope Francis’s second encyclical has flown under the radar.

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These discoveries played out in the Australian’s coverage, which was kicked off by its environment editor, Graham Lloyd. Amid a collection of key points from the encyclical, Lloyd quotes a media release from James Grant, Catholic priest and adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, reassuring Catholics that they “can feel safe in being sceptical about the pope’s opinion”. Yes, a Catholic priest working for a climate denialist thinktank issued a media release telling Catholics how they should react to the pope’s views about climate change.

Lloyd’s article was accompanied by a short comment piece from Tess Livingstone, biographer and admirer of George Pell and board member of the conservative publisher Connor Court. Livingstone confidently predicts that “mass unemployment … would follow the contraction in consumer demand called for in the encyclical”. Returning to the topic at greater length the following day, she complains that Francis “has tied the church to environmentalists well on the left of the political spectrum”.

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Finally, the coup de grâce: a rambling 1,400-word editorial in the Weekend Australian that one presumes was intended as the “urgent rebuttal” the encyclical so richly deserved. Sprinkled with questionable statistics and bizarre assertions (massive global population growth since 1980 is apparently “a sign of economic confidence”), the editorial matches any of the aforementioned columns for hyperbole, denouncing the pope for swallowing “a new, pernicious dogma, that of the anti-development, anti-free market global green movement.” Unless it is returned to the “sensible centre of the political spectrum”, thundered the editorial, the church risked becoming irrelevant.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/08/conservatives-collective-tantrum-over-the-pope-has-been-a-wonder-to-behold

[djean111]

1. The church will become irrelevant if the Pope believes in climate change?

Even though I am an atheist, this seems to be ridiculous.

There must be some gobsmackingly HUGE amount of money to be made by denying climate change.

[MisterP]

2. "Cardinal P--" *immediately changes channel*