Courtney McGrailIn a strange piece on cruxnow.com, Rosie Scammell interprets a Financial Times interview to say that “The Vatican’s financial chief, Cardinal George Pell, has taken the unusual step of criticising Pope Francis’ groundbreaking environmental encyclical, arguing the Catholic Church has ‘no particular expertise in science’.”
This take, since echoed by Damian Thompson at blogs.spectator.co.uk and Kerrie Armstrong at smh.com.au, is all the more peculiar when the cardinal’s comments in the ft.com interview are juxtaposed with passages in Laudato Si.
“It’s got many, many interesting elements. There are parts of it which are beautiful,” the interview records the cardinal as saying, continuing, “But the Church has no particular expertise in science […] the Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters. We believe in the autonomy of science”.
Section 61 of the encyclical, for comparison, says: “On many concrete questions, the Church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion; she knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts, while respecting divergent views.”
Furthermore, section 188 clearly states: “Here I would state once more that the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics. But I am concerned to encourage an honest and open debate so that particular interests or ideologies will not prejudice the common good.”
In stressing the Church’s inability to rule on scientific matters, Cardinal Pell was in fact supporting Laudato Si, which, he told The Financial Times, has “beautifully set out our obligations to future generations and our obligations to the environment”.
Illiberal liberalism
Isabel Hardman offers a better piece at blogs.spectator.co.uk in which she addresses how the religious views of the new Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron have been scrutinised in a way others would rarely experience.
Mr Farron is an evangelical Christian, who has been publicly interrogated on whether he prays before making decisions and his opinions on certain ‘hot-button’ issues. Ms Hardman argues that a sensible approach to these matters is to assume that “every worldview is worthy of suspicion and scrutiny”.
“Yes,” she says, “we should be suspicious of Tim Farron’s Christian worldview – but only in so far as we suspect everyone’s funny jumble of beliefs and assumptions.”
Pointing out that relativists and atheists have worldviews of their own, views that tend to be exempted from “pronouncements about no one belief being universally true”, Ms Hardman advises against making assumptions about the mental capacities of those with whom we disagree, and “about the flawlessness of your own collection of beliefs”.
Gillan Scott, at archbishopcranmer.blogspot.com, has compiled a useful survey of how Mr Farron’s faith became the subject du jour on a day The Times ran an editorial entitled ‘Illiberal Democrat’. It is not the new Lib Dem leader who is illiberal, Mr Scott writes, but “those who have set themselves up as a liberal elite, casting scorn and treating as pariahs those who do not bow down at the throne of secularism”.