Presidential nominee Rick Santorum (R) has a message for Pope Francis: “Leave the science to the scientists” and stop buying into the global warming debate. Santorum made these comments during an interview on Monday with WPHT after host Dom Giordano mentioned that the Pope would be weighing in on the climate change debate later this summer. This comes after a late-April climate conference that was sponsored by the Vatican and closed to anyone who dissented from the man-made global warming narrative.
Santorum, who is a “big fan” of the pope and also a Catholic, believes the nabobs of the liberal media have been misrepresenting the views of the pope by implying he’s more liberal than the popes that preceded him. The pope “is as committed to the nuclear family as I am,” the senator said. “I’m a huge fan of his and his focus on making sure that we have a healthier society.” Santorum mentioned that the church should move forward with caution as it has not been on the right side of science a few times in the past.
“I understand and I sympathize and I support completely the pope’s call for us to do more to create opportunities for people to be able to rise in society, and to care for the poor,” Santorum said. He also suggested the church should focus on what it’s really good at, “which is theology and morality. I think when we get involved with controversial political and scientific theories, then I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible.”
That credibility was strained after it was widely reported that two of the world’s most prominent proponents of abortion and population control attended the Vatican-sponsored climate meeting in April. When the pro-life group C-Fam, headed up by Dr. Stefano Gennarini, took the Vatican’s science academy to task for inviting population control proponents to a climate change conference, the backlash was swift and nasty. Gennarini had raised legitimate concerns about the “Vatican’s invitation to the abortion proponents” to a conference on controlling climate change (neither Sachs nor Ki-moon are climate scientists).
Then, according to Life Site News, Professor Margaret Archer, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS), bragged in her reply on the Vatican-run website End Slavery that she was “personally responsible for inviting Jeffrey Sachs to speak, and was present, working in the Vatican, until after the April 28 meeting on sustainable development, Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity, at which I organized a Panel to dialogue with Ban Ki-moon.” Both Ki-moon and Sachs are left-wing ideologues in favor of abortion and population ‘control.’
She then wrote that she was “appointed by the Pope and responsible directly to him.” Adding that, “I’m afraid that leaves you and your cohort out in the cold.” She wrote that Gennarini’s concerns were “distorted,” and that the “nature of your questions raises some very serious questions about your understanding of Catholic Social Doctrine.”
Even Bishop Marcelo S√°nchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) and PASS, had difficulty trying to explain away that having Sachs and Ki-moon at the climate conference wasn’t antithetical to the church’s teachings and that abortion and population control were not part of the agenda.
“Yes. We had these discussions, and as you can see, the draft SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) don’t even mention abortion or population control. They speak of access to family planning and sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights,” Sorondo replied in a May 18 communication to Gennarini.
Sorondo’s reply did little to allay Gennarini or other pro-life groups, as “phrases such as ‘family planning,’ ‘sexual and reproductive health,’ and ‘reproductive rights’ are euphemisms for contraception, sterilization, and abortion.” Life Site writes that “Gennarini said Sorondo’s response was not only ‘surprising’ but amounted to him ‘openly defy[ing] the position the Holy See has held on these terms for over thirty years because of their association with abortion.'”
“The views expressed by S√°nchez Sorondo are especially perplexing in light of the cooperation of PAS with Sachs and Ban Ki-moon specifically on ‘climate change’ and ‘sustainable development.’ When the logic of these theories is carried out to their full extent they inevitably collide with the Church’s teaching on abortion and population control,” Gennarini wrote in his May 29 First Things article.
Indeed, even Rick Santorum remarked to his host: “I think when we get involved with controversial political and scientific theories, then I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible. And I’ve said this to the bishops many times when they get involved in agriculture policy or things like that, that are really outside of the scope of what the church’s main message is.”
Neither Archer nor Sorondo are scientists, with the former having a PhD in Sociology, and the latter having one in Philosophy.
