Pope Francis's Plastic "Emergency"

By Monica Showalter
American Thinker
September 2, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/pope_franciss_plastic_emergency.html

Reeling from a huge pedophilia, pederasty, and coverup crisis, and refusing to answer charges of participating in the latter from a former papal nuncio, Pope Francis seems to have some very screwy priorities. Here's what the Associated Press, via the New York Post, reported:

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis wants concrete action to combat the “emergency” of plastics littering seas and oceans.

Francis made the appeal in a message Saturday to galvanize Christians and others to work to save what he hails as the “marvelous,” God-given gift of the “great waters and all they contain.”

He said efforts to fight plastics litter must be waged “as if everything depended on us.”

The pope also denounced as “unacceptable” the privatization of water resources at the expense of the “human right to have access to this good.”

Has he gone bonkers? Is this satire from his enemies? The Church is in the middle of the mother of all public relations meltdowns, the faithful are scandalized, and he's talking about the environment and capitalism as the real problems? We still haven't got past the mind-boggling news that 1,000 children were abused by 300 priests in just one of 50 states, in some of the most grotesque circumstances imaginable - actually, they weren't imaginable until we read about it - a priest stripping a boy naked and making him pose as Jesus on the cross to get his perversion on? A priest raping a little girl at the hospital who was getting her tonsils out? We aren't over this. The pope's soggy apologies and efforts to collectivize the guilt aren't cutting it. And there's smoke from the huge fires of abuse rocking once-ultra-Catholic Ireland and once-ultra-Catholic Chile going on at the same time. Sorry, talking about the environment under these circumstances is likely to motivate some Catholics to go throw a plastic milk bottle into the ocean just to teach him a lesson.

For his information, we're not the bad guys this time.

This whole effort to change the topic is the sign of someone out of touch, and lacking interest in what is going on in the organization he's the leader of, by blaming the West for supposedly 'bigger' sins.

Even from his own point of view, the plastics-in-the-ocean 'emergency' is hardly a useful topic for a pontiff cast aside everything else for.

Studies show that nearly all plastic polluting the ocean can be traced to Asia - the socialist and communist parts of Asia as a matter of fact, which is hardly a Catholic bastion of the faithful. According to Forbes:

China, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam are dumping more plastic into oceans than the rest of the world combined, according to a 2017 report by Ocean Conservancy.

And if you want to take it further, note that virtually all of this plastic pollution is coming from the places apparently untouched by either the existence of Catholics or more particularly, the abuse crisis. According to the U.K. Express:

A STAGGERING 90 per cent of all plastic found in the world’s oceans is carried there by just ten rivers - all of them in India, Africa and China.

Is that who the pope is targeting in his plastic pollution remarks? The Church's growing markets? The whole thing is absurd, because from the Church's point of view, if it came down to saving so much as one child or letting the ocean get dirty for awhile, the faith dictates saving the child.

Actually, we know what his leftist Holiness was really trying to do: Blame the West for is pollution sins. Somehow, us with our consumer habits are the real sinners, not the horrid clergy that's right there in front of our eyes and attention.

What's striking to me is how out of touch the pope's remarks were with the very Gospel being read in today's Catholic Churches worldwide this Sunday, when Jesus was asked by the supercilious Pharisees why his followers didn't wash their hands properly before eating, and he replied like this:

He summoned the crowd again and said to them,

"Hear me, all of you, and understand.

Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person;

but the things that come out from within are what defile.

"From within people, from their hearts,

come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder,

adultery, greed, malice, deceit,

licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.

All these evils come from within and they defile."

You can bet I'm not the only one who thought of those words as a rebuke to the problems of pedophile priests infesting our Church and making Christ's name mud among the scandalized faithful. The problems come from within, not from dirt from the exterior.

Yet here we are, with the pope decrying water pollution and privatization (something he likely picked up from the liberation theology greats controlling Church and state in Bolivia, where there has been a water issue and socialist agitating about it), instead of addressing head-on the problems facing the Church, and calling to make the situation better. He's only showing his lost moral authority as he tries to deflect the topic. The issue is just too big now, and calls for a hard papal response, even if it costs him his lefty political allies, if he ever wants to regain the moral authority his office merits.