Brother Alexis Bugnolo, one of the world’s foremost experts on St. Francis of Assisi and Franciscanism, and editor of the Franciscan Archive, presents a counter-encyclical to the Laudato Si‘ of Pope Francis.

Ostensibly written by a future Pope, its full title is “On the Honor and Glory Due to the Divine Majesty of the Most Holy Trinity – Against the Errors of Environmentalism. It “affirms and declares” that the totality of Laudato Si’ and all its parts are to be considered merely as the personal doctrine of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, and not of the Apostolic See of St. Peter.

Some highlights of the counter-encyclical

“We consider it necessary to remove a grave scandal which has shaken the whole world: namely, that which emanated from the once unsullied throne of this Apostolic See. I speak of the encyclical letter, Laudato Si’ of my predecessor, Francis, of infelicitous memory . . . promoting in an official papal document, into which he mixed many half-truths, the falsehood of environmentalism unto the deception of the entire Catholic world.”

The counter-encyclical enumerates many reasons to attest that “it is not man who is the lord and master of creation, but God; that it is not man who is first and foremost responsible for the heavens and the earth and all these contain, but God. . . For this reason it is theologically an effrontery to God to say or concede that the environment of this planet earth depends upon mankind.”

“To say or imply, therefore, that man’s activities in general make this world ugly or pollute it is false, erroneous and implicitly heretical, inasmuch as it impugns the Divine Goodness, Providence and Wisdom of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

“This sinful obsession with earthly things is, as the glorious Doctor of the Church, the Seraphic Saint Bonaventure frequently notes, the necessary consequent of a human spirit bent down to face earthly things by the weight of his own sins and vices and concupiscences.” [cont.]