The Social World

Tag: Vatican

  • King Charles and Pope Leo share the same religion

    King Charles and Pope Leo share the same religion

    The historic meeting October 23 between Pope Leo XIV and King Charles III – the first between a pope and an English monarch since before the Reformation – goes beyond the obvious religious significance. It suggests future cooperation in promoting an entirely different religion, one favored by most of the world’s elites.

    That religion preaches environmental sustainability through draconian measures that demand humanity’s submission at the expense of common sense and science. Not for nothing did Leo and Charles meet less than three weeks before the start of COP30, the United Nations’ annual conference on climate change.

    Throughout his public life, Charles positioned himself as Defender of the Environment. His portfolio supports replacing fossil fuels with alternative energy sources, farming without nitrogen-based fertilizers and instituting carbon taxes and carbon credits. His Majesty even advocates radically changing international economics to achieve environmentalist goals.

    “We must recognize that our economic system is at the heart of the problem precisely because it is at odds and not in harmony with nature’s own economy,” Charles said in 2022. “This situation is indeed dire and the consequences of inaction and business as usual are unimaginable. However, this same economic system of ours, if retargeted, is key to the solution.”

    Charles’ rhetoric and actions match what Pope Leo’s predecessor produced. Pope Francis made environmental activism his papacy’s hallmark when he wrote in 2015 the encyclical Laudato Si, in which he demanded radical, immediate change to avert an environmental collapse that would devastate social and political systems and wreak havoc on the poor.

    “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster,” Francis wrote. “Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress. A technological and economic development which does not leave in its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered progress.”

    Francis solidified his agenda in 2021. On May 14, the Vatican held a one-day conference on environmental and economic issues. John Kerry delivered a keynote address for a panel on “Integral Ecological Sustainability” regarding energy and food.

    Eleven days later, Francis announced the Laudato Si Platform, a seven-year campaign to implement the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Francis described it as belonging to a thrust toward what he called “green economics,” “green education” and “green spirituality.”

    Francis and Charles thus forged a close relationship. In 2017, Francis hosted Charles and his wife Camilla for a papal audience In April, the king and queen made an informal visit to Francis 12 days before his death.

    Most importantly, both backed the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, part of its Agenda 2030. Charles lent his voice to a video introducing the WEF’s program in 2020.

    “We need nothing short of a paradigm shift, one that inspires action at revolutionary levels and pace,” Charles said. “We simply cannot waste anymore time, and the time to act is now.”

    Four months after issuing Laudato Si, Francis addressed the UN. He called Agenda 2030 “an important sign of hope” because “a selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and disadvantaged.”

    Tellingly, the Vatican entitled its 2021 conference on environmental and economic issues, “Dreaming of a Better Reset.”

    Leo intends to continue Francis’ activism. The new pope indicated that commitment clearly as the Vatican commemorated Laudato Si’s 10th anniversary October 1.

    “We inhabit the same planet, and we must care for it together,” Leo said. “I therefore renew my strong appeal for unity around integral ecology and for peace! We must shift from collecting data to caring; and from environmental discourse to an ecological conversion that transforms both personal and communal lifestyles.”

    But the European Union’s focus on solar and wind power makes it dependent on energy sources that are more expensive, less reliable and counterproductive to economic growth. Italy, Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark pay the highest electric bills yet the EU wants to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2040.

    Meanwhile, such developing nations as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia invest heavily in fossil fuels despite emissions.

    “This climate crusade is a masterclass in self-sabotage, chaining its economy to ruinous policies while preaching moral superiority,” said environmental analyst Bjorn Lomborg. “It is economic suicide dressed in eco-virtue.”

    Even Bill Gates believes the panic ranges beyond overstatement.

    “Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

    Given such problems as clerical sex abuse and the breakdown of societal order due to unchecked Muslim immigration, St. Peter’s and Buckingham Palace, respectively, abandon their responsibilities and identities for the sake of intellectual fashion.

  • Will Pope Leo stand up to Islam?

    Will Pope Leo stand up to Islam?

    As Muslim migration roils Europe, some Catholic bishops are starting to notice.

    “For decades, the Islamization of Europe has been progressing through mass immigration,” Polish Bishop Antoni Długosz said July 13, adding that illegal immigrants “create serious problems in the countries they arrive in.”

    Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan spoke more bluntly in March: “We’re witnessing an invasion. They are not refugees. This is an invasion, a mass Islamization of Europe.”

    Yet Pope Leo XIV lives in a different dimension. “In a world darkened by war and injustice . . . migrants and refugees stand as messengers of hope,” Leo said July 25. “Their courage and tenacity bear heroic testimony to a faith that sees beyond what our eyes can see and gives them the strength to defy death on the various contemporary migration routes.”

    Leo’s comments express more than blissful sentimentality. They reveal the Vatican’s role in encouraging open borders and exempting migrants from accountability. In Europe’s case, that involves deliberate blindness to the violent, totalitarian nature of Islam and many of its followers. 

    This Catholic approach toward Islam reflects the ideas ofLouis Massignon, a French scholar from the early 20th century. Massignon described Islam as “the faith of Abraham revived with Muhammad,” and asserted that Muslims “have the right to equality among the monotheisms descended from Abraham.”

    French Catholic scholar Alain Besançon described the results.

    “An entire literature favorable to Islam has grown up in Europe, much of it the work of Catholic priests under the sway of Massignon’s ideas,” he wrote. Besançon attributed that posture to “an underlying dissatisfaction with modernity, and with our liberal, capitalist, individualistic arrangements,” a dissatisfaction that the Vatican embodies.

    “Alarmed by the ebbing of religious faith in the Christian West, and particularly in Europe,” Massignon’s advocates “cannot but admire Muslim devoutness,” Besançon wrote. “Surely, they reason, it is better to believe in something than to believe in nothing, and since these Muslims believe in something, they must believe in the same thing we do.”

    The Catholic Church officially embraced Massignon’s ideas at the Second Vatican Council in two documents. One, Nostra Aetate, focused on the church’s relationship with Judaism but additionally addressed Islam:

    “The Church regards with esteem the Muslims. They adore the one God . . . they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet.”

    The other, Lumen Gentium, declared that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place among these there are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God.”

    That passage made the Catholic catechism.

    But what Besançon called “indulgent ecumenicism” toward Islam goes beyond words. During John Paul II’s papacy, the church embraced outright appeasement.

    Catholic bishops sold underutilized churches and schools to Muslim groups; many of the churches became mosques. In October 2006, the Capuchin Franciscan friars agreed to help the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy (UCOII) build a mosque in Genoa next to a monastery. The friars even helped build the mosque’s foundation.

    But the UCOII – affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood – advocates “an extremist version of the Quran, where Christians, Jews and Westerners are criminalized, as well as women and other Muslims who don’t submit to their rule,” Magdi Allam, a convert to Catholicism from Islam, reported for Milan’s Corriere della Sera.

    In 2006, the group also demanded Islamic schools, banks and clerical review of textbooks. Its president, Mohamed Nour Dachan, refused to sign a document pledging Muslims to accept Italy’s constitution, denounce terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

    Seven months earlier, a Vatican cardinal even suggested that Muslim students receive Islamic religious instruction in the hour reserved for Catholic instruction in Italian schools.

    “If there are 100 Muslim children in a school, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taught their religion,” said the late Cardinal Renato Martino, then the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. “If we said ‘no’ until we saw equivalent treatment for the Christian minorities in Muslim countries, I would say that we were placing ourselves on their level.”

    In 2008, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales asked Catholic schools to reserve prayer rooms for Muslim students and to adapt bathroom facilities for ritual cleansing before prayer. But the worst example of appeasement took place in Belgium.

    As part of a campaign to force the government to grant amnesty, Belgium’s Catholic bishops turned their churches into homes for Muslim migrants, making them squatters. In May 2006, more than 30 Belgian churches served such a purpose. About 300 Africans occupied Antwerp’s Magdalena Chapel. Other churches held as many as 700 squatters.

    At Our Lady of Succor Church in Brussels, squatters lived in small tents donated by Catholic relief agencies, conducted Muslim services, erected computer tables near the pulpit and even set fires on the floor.

    Friar Herwig Arts described a scene at Antwerp’s Jesuit chapel: migrants “removed the tabernacle [and] installed a television set and radios, depriving us of the opportunity to pray in our own chapel and say Mass.” He went on, “For me, the place has been desecrated. I feel I cannot enter it anymore.” 

    Belgium’s bishops were not amused. Arts was chided by Belgium’s leading clergy. “Solidarity cannot be limited to one’s own nation, said the late Cardinal Godfried Danneels, then the country’s leading prelate. Monsingor Luc van Looy, then the bishop of Ghent, even said “illegal fugitives” were “entitled to a good place in our society. Arts has been silent on the topic ever since.

    But two decades later, Kazakhstan’s Bishop Schneider refuses to stay silent: “This is a global political agenda by the powerful of the world to destroy Europe.”

    Leo thus faces an existential challenge, one that blissful sentimentality cannot answer: Will he allow a church that played a pivotal role in creating European civilization to perform a more decisive part in destroying it?

  • Catholics should hope for a speedy conclave

    Catholics should hope for a speedy conclave

    The Conclave, which meets in the Vatican today to elect a new pope, is likely to be brief. For the past hundred years, no conclave has exceeded four days, with two days being the most common. It seems unlikely that this one will be an exception.

    Many Catholics, at least, hope as much. The cardinals will not wish to expose the divisions within the Church to the world through a prolonged and fractious conclave. Taking their time would suggest a Church paralyzed by competing factions. Convening quickly would project unity and resolve.

    The cardinals – mindful of both history and optics – will not wish to let ideological divisions harden into public spectacle

    But this being the Catholic Church, nothing is certain: deliberations can range from hours to years.

    Conclaves emerged from the 1059 papal bull of Pope Nicholas II, In Nomine Domini, which gave cardinals the sole responsibility for electing the pope. Before 1059, popes were chosen through a volatile mix of Roman clergy, public acclamation, aristocratic intrigue and imperial interference, with powerful noble families and emperors treating the papacy as a prize to be seized rather than a spiritual office to be discerned.

    In the medieval period, conclaves often dragged on for months. One of the most infamous examples was in 1268, when the cardinals gathered in Viterbo, in keeping with the custom of meeting in the city where the pope had died. Clement IV, a Toulousain former soldier and lawyer who had entered the Church after the death of his wife, had sought to avoid the anti-papal Ghibellines dominating Rome and so spent his entire pontificate in the Tuscan fortress city.

    Despite the presence of the future Pope Honorius IV – who would be elected in a single ballot at the 1285 conclave – the cardinals became hopelessly deadlocked with factions unable to reach consensus. After months of stalemate, the local Viterbesi intervened: they removed the roof and restricted the cardinals to bread and water. After two years and nine months, Gregory X was finally elected. In his 1274 bull Ubi periculum, he codified many of these tactics to ensure future elections would proceed more swiftly.

    Ubi periculum laid the foundation for all subsequent conclaves, making them less of a husting and more of a spiritual retreat by sequestering cardinals from the outside world and dictating that each day should begin with Mass and prayer.

    Nonetheless, politics persisted. The jus exclusivae – or “right of exclusion” – was traditionally claimed by the Catholic monarchs of France, Spain and Austria, allowing them to veto certain candidates. Though never officially recognized, it was influential during the 17th and 18th centuries.

    The jus exclusivae was explicitly banned in 1904 by the bull Commissum Nobis of Pope St Pius X, following the Austrian veto of Cardinal Rampolla at the conclave that elected him. Yet even in 1963, General Franco attempted to block the election of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini. His intervention was rejected, and Montini became Pope Paul VI.

    Alongside abolishing the jus exclusivae, Pius X also issued the apostolic constitution Vacante Sede Apostolica, which formalized procedures during the sede vacante and required more structured meetings of the College of Cardinals. John Paul II’s Universi Dominici Gregis (1996) went further, mandating that cardinals meet daily before the conclave begins.

    These daily “General Congregations” are opportunities for cardinals to discuss what they desire in the next pope. In 2013, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio made a passionate intervention calling for the Church to open itself to the world – a speech widely seen as pivotal in his election. These gatherings ensure the cardinals will likely enter the conclave with a clear sense of their preferred candidate.

    They may also favor the election of a conservative. Much has been made of Pope Francis’s influence; 108 of the 135 electors under 80 are his appointees. Less attention has been paid to those over 80, among whom the more conservative generations appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI are more numerous. While they cannot vote, they are permitted to attend the General Congregations, comprising 40 percent of the total 252 cardinals.

    Among them is Cardinal Zen, the 93-year-old freedom-fighting emeritus bishop of Hong Kong. Once arrested by the Chinese authorities, he had to seek their permission to travel to Rome to pay his respects to Pope Francis. Outspoken to say the least, he has been highly critical of Cardinal Pietro Parolin – the Vatican Secretary of State and leading liberal contender – not least over his views on Vatican–China relations.

    Another is Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria. At 92, he is one of the last surviving prelates to have attended the Second Vatican Council. In response to Amoris Laetitia (2016), which opened the door in some cases to Communion for Catholics in irregular marital situations, Arinze declared that such Catholics must not receive the Eucharist unless they live “as brother and sister.” He has also publicly supported the conservative practice of receiving Communion while kneeling.

    Francis frequently elevated cardinals from the Church’s geographical peripheries. As these relatively inexperienced men descended upon the Eternal City, the General Congregations may have presented an opportunity for the older generation to assert their influence. And that influence will likely have been a conservative one.

    Whoever is chosen, all signs point to a swift and disciplined election. The cardinals – mindful of both history and optics – will not wish to let ideological divisions harden into public spectacle. Those making the journey to Rome are likely to be treated to speedy white smoke and St. Peter’s successor stepping out onto the loggia this week. Under the watchful eyes of the older generation, we may yet see a conservative.

  • Pope Francis’s problem goes beyond vulgar language

    Pope Francis’s problem goes beyond vulgar language

    The Pope is only infallible when he speaks “ex cathedra” — i.e. when pronouncing on doctrinal matters of faith as Pontifex Maximus. So, last week, when Francis privately told a gathering of bishops that he opposed the ordination of homosexual priests because there was too much “frociaggine” — or faggotry — in the priesthood already, he was not speaking formally as the Vicar of Christ. Francis’s remarks inevitably caused anger within the LGBQT communities. Fabrizio Marrazzo, leader of the Italian Gay Party, accused the Pope of “backsliding on gay rights.”

    The truth is that the Pope is a specialist when it comes to shooting off his mouth

    The Vatican has duly apologized in a statement. It said: “The Pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms and he extends his apologies to those who felt offended by the use of a term, reported by others.”

    You can almost hear the curial anxiety in that quote. But the truth is that the Pope is a specialist when it comes to shooting off his mouth. He’s famous in Roman Catholic circles for his “salty tongue.” The veteran Catholic reporter John Allen says that he has a reputation for “off-color, occasionally vulgar language.” He once offended fecund Catholics by saying they ought not to “breed like rabbits.” On another occasion, he said that “if a good friend speaks badly of my mother, he can expect to get punched” — an impious remark, though no doubt his madre would have been proud. 

    But it probably won’t do to get too hung up about the Pope’s occasional verbal lapses. Even the successors to Peter are human. What is more disturbing for Catholics is the Pope’s apparent inconsistency on the matter of homosexuality and Catholic Church teaching. Last year he distressed traditionalists by opening the door to the Church’s blessing of same-sex unions. Yet at the same time he seems to be strongly opposed to gay men, even if they are not sexually active, joining the priesthood. Church teaching suggests that it “cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called “gay culture” — though they should be treated with “respect and sensitivity.”

    These are difficult questions for a Church that has struggled to preserve its teachings on matters of sexuality in recent decades, especially following the widespread clerical child sex-abuse scandal. The Catholic faithful would benefit from a spiritual leader who provided a little more light and less heat.   

    This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.