Mark Steyn writes:
Yet, putting personal preferences aside, the notion of a papal encyclical on climate change in order to “impact” a UN conference is utterly depressing in its cobwebbed banality.
And also kind of decadent at a time when some of the oldest Christian communities on earth are being systematically extinguished. That’s a real present-tense crisis, not one of those Al Gore if-we-don’t-act-now-time-is-running-out-to-save-the-polar-bears crisis. It’s happening now, now, now. Oughtn’t that to take priority for the Bishop of Rome? Is the Pope Catholic?
Nor is the onslaught on Christians confined to the Holy Land and the rest of the Middle East. Today’s paper includes an account of the ransacking of a Italian church by a man uttering certain phrases in Arabic. He smashed the baptismal font, two altarpieces, a painting of the Assumption, statues of the Madonna with child, our Lady of the Sorrows, our Lady of the Rosary, and St Joseph. No doubt he was just another of the “mentally ill”. Maybe all these mentally ill Koran-quoters would be worth an encyclical.
But no: The Pope’s decided to “tackle the issue of global warming head on”. Maybe he could just give Michael E Mann a fake papal knighthood instead…