Pope Benedict XVI addressed over 150,000 people in Sydney, Australia, on Thursday as part of Whirled-Youth Day World Youth Day, a massive Catholic get-together meant to infuse the church with the energy of its youth. The pontiff commented on the beauty of the natural world as he saw it from aboard the papal plane. That Pope's-eye-view, he said, was a source of inspiration and wonder. "It is as though one catches glimpses of the Genesis creation story -- light and darkness, the sun and the moon, the waters, the earth, and living creatures." However, all is not well with the world's environment, he said. "Reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth, erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world's mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption." Which reminds us, anyone wanna buy a slightly used bobble-head Pope?
source: Agence France-Presse, Reuters
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Wolverine Posted 5:35 am
17 Jul 2008
And of course, the Catholic Church is one of the main bad guys on the planet on the overpopulation issue, which is one of the two root causes of environmental problems, and the Church couldn't be more on the wrong side of it.
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Wolfy Posted 10:45 am
17 Jul 2008
Does anyone else see the not-so-subtle hypocrisy here? The fact that millions of dollars in natural resources are annually expended on the comforts of one man seems to elude even the enlighten ones. Does God tell these people to squander our natural resources so that an elitist clergyman can tell poor people how guilty they should be for trying to survive? I don't think our loving God wants us to venerate mere humans by providing them with celestial palaces so that they may talk down to us.
Jesus is the leader of the true and only Christian church. The folks in the funny hats are just the moneychangers in the halls of the temple.
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caniscandida Posted 6:38 pm
17 Jul 2008
But really, Wolfy, you have to get over that very tired 16th-century-Protestant anti-papal rant. A lot of money is surely spent to maintaining the various buildings and countless artworks and manuscripts contained in the Vatican -- and these are part of the patrimony of all humanity. Retro-Protestant and post-Protestant squawkers may indeed question the justifiability of those expenses. But, while the pope lives comfortably, I doubt his personal budget amounts to anything like even a million dollars, let alone "millions."
By the way, the "head" of the Roman Catholic Church is NOT the pope. Only ignorant Protestants, and ignorant journalists, say that. The head of the Church is none other than Jesus Christ.
Wolverine,
it is indeed true that the official Church doctrine condemns both artificial birth control and abortion. And since historically most Catholics belonged to agrarian societies, Catholic preachers tended always to encourage procreation and large families.
It is also true that generally, and more radically, Church doctrine has been excruciatingly anthropocentric. "Pro-life" is disgraceful hypocrisy: non-human life has little or no value.
I am glad that the Pope has been saying some pro-environmentalist things lately. But I wonder how effective they may be. The Pope himself cannot say too much about how to "reduce consumption," for example. More importantly, all the pastors in all the pulpits around the world are much more important than the Pope, regarding this sort of radical shift in emphasis. And there is no sign that those pastors are at once going to come aboard the Pope's new green machine.
To be sure, many progressive Christians, including Catholics, have already been doing some noble environmentalist things. Some heroes in this regard, it may pain the retro-Protestants to know, are in fact members of religious orders, i.e. communities of nuns and monks.
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javaearth Posted 8:33 am
18 Jul 2008
If the Catholic church really believed in being more environmental, than they would have said this from the start and not encouraged more people to have more babies to destroy more resources!
I find that "man"ufactured religions are set up to keep people from actually thinking for themselves!
Over time, I have come to across many different people. Many people that are not religious are actually more socially conscious because they have had to think for themselves!
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caniscandida Posted 7:28 pm
19 Jul 2008
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mtvyfan Posted 1:39 am
21 Jul 2008
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caniscandida Posted 2:25 am
21 Jul 2008
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