The Washington Post last month enthused that Pope Francis’s environmental encyclical was a “papal juggernaut” that had rolled over opponents of the global warming hypothesis. The “deniers” of climate change were defeated in this quite imaginative narrative.
But now, weeks later, the somewhat reasonable observer wonders whether the huge agitational propaganda effort by the secular Left was all for naught.
Over the weekend, for the second week in a row, at a Roman Catholic church in suburban Chicago, the local pastor chose to publish highlights of the Pope’s exegesis on the environment and Genesis 1, and man’s duty to the Earth, in the weekly church bulletin. The highlights were drawn from America, the Jesuit news outlet.
Across the country, in a more rural, tourist town, not a word was mentioned in the local Catholic church’s weekly newsletter about the eco-encyclical by Pope Francis.
The contrast is interesting here, but also shows, on a small scale, that the hoped-for blitz of Catholics by the Roman Catholic church infrastructure is not materializing, on behalf of the secular global warming movement.
The suburban church, cited above, is in an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago, and comes off as a somewhat liberal Catholic enclave, with quotes from the Jesuits in several spots in the weekly newsletter, as well as how-to advice on spirituality and related matters, and a call for volunteers next month for a charitable event in the inner city of Chicago. The priest this past Sunday was from a nearby, all-boys Catholic high school, and wore the traditional Dominican white cassock, adorned with a large rosary.
The other, exurban church, considered middle-of-the road by one of its attendees, in recent weeks, didn’t even go that far in terms of evangelizing.
Is this sincerely what the WashPo thinks is a juggernaut on behalf of the environment by the Roman Catholic Church? Seriously, can’t reporters //@Anthony_Faiola” target=”_blank”>Anthony Faiola and //@chriscmooney” target=”_blank”>Chris Mooney get a thesaurus, and search for other, more accurate words to describe this serious lack of momentum for the eco-encyclical within in the church?
From the news coverage in recent days, it seems that the Pope has already returned to more traditional, Roman Catholic preaching themes, like helping the poor, and the dispossessed.
No doubt His Holiness will be back in the news, on the environmental front, when he speaks to the U.S. Congress and the U.N. this fall.
But things will return to normal for Catholics after the inevitable, overblown media frenzy. The juggernaut, like global warming itself, is but an inconvenient myth.
