“Laudato Si” leans heavily on Romantic personification (“our Sister, Mother Earth . . . cries out to us”) and nature poetry. These are arational devices that evade logical argument. They are employed here to justify left-wing ideology and more concentrated power. The document hands a bouquet to all statists, collectivists, crackpot world-improvers, antagonists to free enterprise, and to freedom itself. Every authoritarian jackal and central planner on the planet can pluck a bloom from it.

Papal suspicion of private property and infatuation with a “theology of poverty” lend sanctimony to the class antagonism hibernating in the church’s “preferential option for the poor,” a problematic concept derived from Liberation Theology. (Problematic because the promise of the resurrection, the ineradicable core of Christianity, is not directed to a class, but to individuals.)

It is reasonable to think that Bergolio is a greater friend to poverty than to the poor.

[…]

A strain of inadvertent comedy runs through “Laudato Si.” Il Papa assumes the posture of governess to the world—Mary Poppins on the Throne of Peter. Who else could align the magisterium of the Catholic Church with exhortation to turn off the air conditioner, shut the lights, and be sure to recycle? For this Christ died: to atone for petroleum products. And for carbon emissions from private cars carrying only one or two people. For this Christ died: to atone for petroleum products. And for carbon emissions from private cars carrying only one or two people.

While Christians in the birthplaces of Christianity are crucified and beheaded for their faith, young girls are kidnapped and sold for the price of a pack of cigarettes, our encyclical whines: “In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish.” [cont.]