Flagship German FAZ Assails Pope’s “Distorted Depiction Of Civilization”…Encyclical’s Vision “A Frightening Idea”

Journalist Jan Grossarth of flagship political daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) says it all in just the first sentences of his recent online commentary here:

Where the Pope errs

The Pope’s Encyclical is chock full of criticism and anti-liberal distortions. The good of the industrial present hardly gets mentioned.”

This is quite a comment for Germany’s leading political daily, which has been consistently green and a devoted purveyor of climate alarmism.

Grossarth is not the first to criticize the Pope’s massively one-sided, über-pessimistic position outlined in the Encyclical. Other journalists and observers have done so as well.

Increasingly it is growing clearer with each passing day that Pope Francis has made a fatal miscalculation in allowing certain alarmist, extremist scientists to dictate the Encyclical’s tone. They have rendered it a grotesquely flawed document.

The FAZ’s Grossarth cannot understand why the Pope is coming down so hard on modern society and its many virtues:

For many, and not by a long shot only those in the Northern World, capitalism is a paradise: Hunger is receding, more and more people are going to school, are getting older, and don’t have to work as long or as hard.”

In a nutshell, most things that earlier popes and Catholics requested in former times have been expediently delivered by free market systems. Much misery, squalor and suffering have been alleviated. Ehrlichian visions of doom from just 40 years ago never came to pass – due to modern industrial progress.

Grossarth thinks the Pope is overly “pessimistic” – someone who is way out of bounds in equating “capitalism to greed”. He characterizes Pope Francis as a person who has an incurable, chronic habit of presenting only the very ugly side of things. He writes:

In the Encyclical there are so many examples of one-sided negative perceptions that in summary a distorted depiction of civilization is the result.”

This should not be a surprise as the lead contributor to the Encyclical was German alarmist scientist Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber. It’s truly a pity the Pope did not have the wisdom to recognize the document for what it was: a power-grabbing instrument by extreme environmental activists masquerading as scientists. Under John Paul II or Benedict such a polarizing and distorted encyclical would have never seen the light of day.

Grossarth also makes the point that Francis is extremely adversarial to free-market systems, that he is someone who defines them as the world’s evil.

Instead, all the abstract talk is about ‘refraining’, and the ‘common good’, or of ‘irrational trust in progress’. For the Pope, man’s intervention in nature leads to a vicious circle.

Economic liberalism (symbolized by Adam Smith’ s ‘invisible hand’) is named in the same breath along with sickness, forced labor, slavery or child abuse.”

Grossarth also sharply criticizes Pope Francis for making claims “without any evidence”. He writes that the “Pope leaves the facts aside.” The FAZ journalist thinks that the Pope’s vision of an exodus back to an agrarian world of more natural, pre-industrial living is totally misguided. On the Pope’s vision, Grossarth writes:

Thus here the pre-industrial times are revered as a time when ‘man and things’ were still ‘in friendly harmony’. The return to that time is a frightening idea.”

11 responses to “Flagship German FAZ Assails Pope’s “Distorted Depiction Of Civilization”…Encyclical’s Vision “A Frightening Idea””

  1. Loodt Pretorius

    You tend to forget that in the pre-industrial age life was indeed very good if you were a Catholic monk. Plenty of food and wine from the Abbey gardens and obedient peasants hanging unto every word you say. No wonder he gets misty eyed thinking about that cloistered past.

    For the rest of us a totally different story. The archeological digs uncovering skeletons from those times show how the bones and joints suffered wear and tear from the hard work in the fields.

  2. DICK R

    The superstitious old fool should stick to his barmy medieval mumbo jumbo religion.

    1. AndyG55

      Well said !!

      Spends most of his life waving little smoking pots, sticking rice wafers on peoples tongues and sprinkling water on their foreheads…….. and then expects to be taken seriously on anything scientific ??? seriously !!

      1. Brian G Valentine

        Performing sacrament duties is more or less his job. He evidently broadened his job description to imitating Che Guevara or other Latin American “socialist revolutionary.”

  3. jim

    But he should be taken seriously. This shows what a half truth education produces. The truth of what he says is climate change. It always changes. The only way to stop nature is a “hand of God”. Unfortunately, that would mean all but a select few die. So I believe, he has fallen into the hands of those calling for armeggedon. You cannot preach for advancement of mankind, if you are calling for death. And I had high hopes for him.

  4. Brian G Valentine

    Grossarth is a good writer, I have seen his columns before.

    His Royal Highness and Majesty the Pope is a socialist, and frankly his manifesto doesn’t sound all that much different from those of Che Guevara or the average Latin American “revolutionary.” None of that has done much to lift the lives of average people in Middle and South America, many of these people turned to Catholicism – which has now turned against them too!

    Sickening

  5. BobW in NC

    Came across this intriguing tidbit—that the Vatican’s science advisor is “…a self-professed atheist…named Hans Schellnhuber [who] appears to believe in a Mother Earth [GAIA].”

    In the same article, GAIA is described as, “…“[a] scientific pantheism,” a kind that appeals to atheistic scientists. It is an updated version of the pagan belief that the universe itself is God, that the Earth is at least semi-divine — a real Brother Sun and Sister Water! Mother Earth is immanent in creation and not transcendent, like the Christian God.”

    And THIS is the input that restricted climate “skeptics” from offering opposing views to global warming, and upon which the Pope relied in forming his encyclical?

    Oh, my!

    Source: https://stream.org/scientific-pantheist-who-advises-pope-francis/

  6. Mike Heath

    All roads lead to Rome.
    Rome doesn’t care how they get there so long as they do.
    Any way to Rome is a good way for them.

  7. John Silver

    The pope is a commie.

  8. Mindert Eiting

    In the early twentieth century Planck (1858-1947), Einstein (1879-1955), and Schrodinger (1887-1961), went to Rome in order to have secret talks with the Pope, Dionysius III. Historians still debate whether the young Heisenberg (1901-1976) was a member of this group but he probably was. There is also some doubt about the role of Einstein who may have had philosophical objections to the enterprise. For some time these three men were more often seen in the Vatican than at their Universities. Their success was overwhelming as finally the Pope wrote the Encyclical, Beatus si Motus in Discretim, greeted by a part of the scientific community as the long-awaited Theology of Quantum Mechanics. For a number of years disappointed scientists refused to accept the holy text but they were considered stubborn deniers. In Copenhagen a certain Bohr (1885-1962) tried a counter revolution but he died as a forgotten scoundrel. This is the success story of science and Schellnhuberlein knows this. So we are left behind as fossils who refused to believe that our deep oceans will become boiling hot, that all our ice will melt, and the sea levels rise to unprecedented heights as punishment for our greed and outlet gasses.

  9. Frederick Colbourne

    Anyone familiar with the history of Hispanic political philosophy will recognize the anti-democratic views propounded by Franco, Stroessner, Pinochet, Peron, etc.

    Note that Pope Francis has blamed the Western powers for failure to oppose the Holocaust. He ignores the role of Pope Pius XII.

    In 1949, while a student at a Christian Brothers high school, I bought a book about the Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich, remaindered for one dollar.

    For me that book was a story like Conan Doyle’s about the “dog that didn’t bark in the night”. The Pope was silent about the genocide of Jews and the “curious incident” was that the Nazis went easy on the Catholic Church.

    (The paperback version of the book is available from Amazon and can be previewed on Google Books.
    http://www.amazon.com/Persecution-Catholic-Church-Third-Reich/dp/1589801377)

    Pope Francis has betrayed his office.

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