The following comes from a July 7 LA Times article by Chris Megerian:
Buried in Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change was a reference that Governor Jerry Brown could have appreciated.
The pontiff cited a French priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose controversial writings on science and religion veered from church dogma and were forbidden for Brown to study when he was a young Jesuit seminary student.
Now, six decades later, the same priest was being used by the pope, leader of the faith to which Brown once pledged, to make the case for addressing climate change, an issue Brown champions.
“What’s unacceptable becomes acceptable,” Brown said in an interview.
The Democratic governor is scheduled to speak here Wednesday at a conference on climate change, where he is seeking partners for his push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The governor has repeatedly said that California cannot fight global warming alone. Here, he can appeal to participants from throughout the Americas and lay groundwork for his attendance at a global environmental summit in Paris later this year.
For Brown, who left the seminary and eventually began his long career in government, climate change is an issue that melds the spiritual and the political.
Unlike some politicians, Brown is mostly private about his faith, and he declined to discuss his personal practices. But he occasionally cites his religious background in announcing political decisions, and it clearly remains a key influence.
Over the years, Brown became well known for sampling other philosophies and beliefs, notably a period of studying Zen Buddhism in Japan in the 1980s.
But his Jesuit background remained a constant influence. Brown told a Times reporter in 1987 that he was at the Zen monastery on the advice of some priests, and he spoke of the intersection of politics and spirituality.
“Religious fanaticism has caused countless bloodshed, even today, but there is also within religion a tradition of liberality, of respect for the individual and of compassion,” he said.
The governor does not always align his policies with church teachings. Like many Catholic Democrats, he supports legalized abortion and same-sex marriage.
But on environmental issues, Brown’s approach appears consistent with the pope’s views, according to the Most Reverend Michael Barber, bishop of Oakland.
Brown “teaches that consuming and having more things is not the true goal of society,” Barber said. “That is a very Catholic thing.”
Brown clearly welcomes the coalescence of climate change and religion in the pope’s encyclical. Francis’ involvement, Brown said, is “bringing a moral and theological dimension that adds to the market and political calculations.”
Some Catholics have chafed at the pope’s decision to become involved in the issue of global warming. Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania who is running for president, said he’s “better off leaving science to the scientists.”
In response, Brown tweaked Santorum on Twitter.
“The science is clear,” the governor wrote. “Climate change is not a hoax, but an existential threat. Get with the science, get with the @Pontifex” (the pope’s Twitter name).
Francis and Brown don’t see eye to eye on everything. In his encyclical, the pope expressed concern about cap and trade, a system used by California in which permits to pollute are traded and fees are levied.
“In no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require,” Francis wrote. “Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”
To my humble eyes Jerry Brown and Pope Francisco seem birds of a Jesuitical feather for whom the ends justify the means. California is swirling down the drain and so can you.
California is a mess. Morally and debt-wise. Both of these violate the Catholic Faith.
This article illustrates something really important to the Church, and to those involved in handing on the Faith intact. It illustrates that the secular world will go to any rounds to hear what it wants to hear from Pope Francis. It will also go to great rounds to ignore what it doesn’t like. The governor finds something “buried” in Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change that he can “relate” to, while he ignores the far more prominent statements (on abortion, for instance) that he cannot relate to, because to acknowledge their validity could easily ruin his political career. Hence the selective reading of Laudato Si.
That’s been the story with Francis since his inauguration. His platitudinous “who am I to judge” was used extensively by politicians to justify their support for the homosexual life-style and same sex marriage. Francis came to be viewed as a great forward-thinking religious leader willing to break with his outdated Church, holding out the hope that soon he would sanction the ordination of women, of married men, approve gay marriage and on and on. For that reason, his strong pronouncements against abortion and gay marriage were ignored with nods and winks.
The result is that up to this point Francis has helped the anti-climate change people, those who support abortion and contraception and those who support gay marriage, while he has…
set back the cause of those who fight to have life recognized as sacred from conception to natural death. I know that sounds grim, but I can see no other way to read it. The question for Francis, now, is will he continue to play the popular hero, or will he take the world to task and insist that it listen to his full message, not just the parts it likes.
If we can believe Gov. Brown about being Catholic, we have a bridge in
S.F. to sell. How can a Pro Abortion politician call himself a practicing Catholic. This is the same line that Nancy Pelosi uses and it is laughable. Please no more lies from FORMERr Catholic pols. Gov. Brown spent ONE YEAR in a Jesuit seminary. This does not make him an expert on what the Catholic church teaches nor does it make him a Jesuit.
Brown says that he’s against climate change but he doesn’t take real action because the Democrats have conflicting interests that are more important. After Brown spent a year with Mother Teresea, he said that he was now pro-life. But this changed when the Democrats told him that they have conflicting interests that are more important. This is a profile of a man who is morally and philosophically weak.
Jesus says that you can not serve both God and money/power.
agreement with Gov. Brown is a journey down the wrong path.
“What’s unacceptable becomes acceptable,” Brown proudly declaims.
This is what the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan(hardly a conservative) identified as “defining deviancy down.” Now acceptable: redefined marriage, “gender theory”, social drug use, family-unit breakdown, secular-atheist climate-opinion-as-dogma.
However, if Brown opposed all these while in the old Jesuit formation system in 1960 as “wrong”, unacceptable— if he was wrong then, then he is just as certainly wrong now–since “there are no objective absolutes.” (Oh: we just disproved the assertion.)
More wise ruminations from a sage, proud, former pot-smoking political leader (i.e.,parallels with Barry POTUS).
The Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was a big fan of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, even dedicating a whole chapter about him in his 1967 book FOOTPRINTS IN A DARKENED FOREST. He even says: “It is very likely that within fifty years when all the trivial, verbal disputes about the meaning of Teilhard’s “unfortunate” vocabulary will have died away or have taken a secondary place, Teilhard will appear like John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century.” But I think this is one of the few things that the great Archbishop Sheen got wrong.
Thanks for enlightening us on this. I think this is among the things Sheen got RIGHT!
Please tell us where you got that quotation from Archbishop Sheen? Was it in a book of his, or was it something he was reported to have said?
Sorry! I misread Kapalua’s post where he gave the name of the Archbishop Sheen’s book.
Dare I ask if Pope Francis is to the papacy what President Carter was to the presidency?
Since when does the office of the papacy qualify one as a scientist?
Were not the ideas of Chardin condemned? If not condemned, disqualified?
One cannot not attribute to rational man those of non rational animals.
[Who in the Vatican selects or vets characters such as this?]
Followup by Chris Megerian in the July 9, 2015, LA Times:
“Jerry Brown will speak on climate change at Vatican event hosted by Pope
Francis”
Gov. Jerry Brown is going to the Vatican later this month for a summit on climate change hosted by Pope Francis …
More at https://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-jerry-brown-vatican-20150709-story.html
Man made Global Warming is NOT settled science. Many scientists consider it’s just climate changing ….LIKE IT ALWAYS HAS….and in the words of a local priest, from the pulpit, [before the encyclical] …..”Man made Global Warming is a Hoax”.
It gives one pause for concern when the radical environmentalist Governor “Moonbeam” aka Jerry Brown and the Pope are on the same page on this issue.
Again: I am struck by the writers of Laudato Si (because I doubt it was our magical-visionary, stream-of-consciousness pontiff) purging out the most important final verses of S. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun, from which the whole encyclical is titled):
Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Bodily Death,
from whose embrace no living person can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those she finds doing Your most holy will.
The second death can do no harm to them.”
S. Francis shows his consciousness that everyone will come before the King of Kings and Lord of Lords (that be Jesus; who is only peripherally mentioned in Laudato Si, only 17 x’s out of 246 paragraphs, 180 pages).
Why? Francis reveals…
Because Francis reveals his real thinking in 243: “At the end, we will find ourselves face to face with the infinite beauty of God (cf. 1 Cor 13:12), or universal salvation for all: in conflict with the Catechism of the Catholic Church: 4 Last Thins, Heaven, Hell, Death, and Judgment.
Oh well. If he is right, nothing matters anyway: but if the Catechism is wrong, there is going to be a whole Hell of a lot of a problem.
In Laudato Si, where P. Francis and Bp. Sorondo-Sanchez speak of “ecology”, “environment”, “ecosystem” and their derivatives over 100 x’s, but mention Jesus Christ only 17x’s in 180 pp’s, there is a clear blueprint for international “agreements” with “functionaries” to create “a world political authority (cf. n. 175): PF and the radicals in the Pont. Academy/Social Sciences (Sorondo-Sanchez, Schellnhuber; Naomi Klein; Jeffrey Sachs) seek “one world with a common plan” (n. 164), a “global consensus” (which they will decide for us, of course) and will impose “assessments” for environmental costs (#183-185, #52). Leftist Democrats like Jerry Brown will have no problem jumping on this world-dominion planning exercise…
To really get a feel for how much Bp. Marcelo Sorondo-Sanchez, the chief of PASS (Pont. Acad. Soc. Sciences) and PF’s chief advisor now on “climate-theory” has sold out the Church and its teachings to the UN’s agenda (determined at the Cairo & Beijing Conferences) of “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights,” read a strikingly pointed interview response 6/25/15 by Sorondo-Sanchez to Stefano Gennarini in First Things. It is eye-opening article, and Gennarini is “on it” in terms of his facts, as the point-counterpoint shows (Sorondo-Sanchez’ responses to his Q’s are in bold print):
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/06/a-response-from-the-pas
Also, it is clearer than ever why Pius X forbade the study of the post-modern philosophers, esp. Hegel, in seminaries and Catholic theological institutions: Bp. Marcelo Sorondo-Sanchez, once a Thomist, now completely given over to Hegelian-theory (ex. thesis-antithesis-synthesis), reflects that entirely in his personal remarks, his ghost-writing in LS, and we can conclude in his advice to hapless P. Francis—who after all, having failed his doctoral dissertation at Frankfurt, is wowed to be guided by “real scholars” like MSS and Card. Kasper.