Source: LifeSiteNews.com
The Sixth forum of the “Laudato Si’ Communities” was held in Verona, Italy, earlier this month. This is a series of meetings devoted to propagating Pope Francis’ views on what is called “the climate emergency.”
This latest affair was called “Doubling the Commitment.” This was a reference to Francis’ new exhortation, Laudate Deum, in which he warns us that the end is near, both for “our suffering planet” and, by extension, for us.
He struck the same note in his opening video message to the Verona meeting, warning that it’s “a very difficult time” and that “within 30 years the world will be unlivable.”
The “apocalypse now” message is by now drearily familiar, but I was still surprised by the messianic zeal with which it is being proposed by leaders within the Catholic Church.
Take Bishop Domenico Pompili, who hosted the event. He opened the forum by emphasizing that simply transitioning to policies that protect the planet is not enough. What is needed, he said, is an ecological “conversion,” a striving to create a planetary “utopia.”
I am merely a poor convert, but Pompili makes protecting the environment sound like a spiritual quest. And the only spiritual quest I want to be on is one that leads not to some earthly utopia, but home to Heaven.
Why do the same Church leaders who shy away from boldly proclaiming the Catholic faith suddenly transform into street preachers when evangelizing for environmentalism?
But if I was surprised by Pompili’s fervor in promoting environmentalism, I was actually shocked that one of the leaders of the Club of Rome, its vice president Carlos Alvarez Pereira, would be invited to address a Vatican-sponsored conference.
You see, the Club of Rome is a Masonic lodge founded in 1968 on David Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy. Like the World Economic Forum, but preceding it by several decades, it’s a collection of rich Western “elite” mixed in with heads of state, UN bureaucrats, and business leaders.
Unlike the WEF, however, it is an explicitly Masonic organization. As a USCCB committee concluded in 1985, “the principles and basic rituals of Masonry embody a naturalistic religion active participation in which is incompatible with Christian faith and practice.” Two years earlier, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and with the personal approval of Pope St. John Paul II, had declared that “faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion… [Masonic] principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden.”
Moreover, the Club of Rome has from its founding been one of the chief promoters of both the Malthusian myth of overpopulation and radical population control programs. To achieve its aims, it has not hesitated to sow fear among the population by fabricating data. That is to say, lying….