Courtney McGrailFew reactions to the new papal encyclical have been as bizarre as how voiceofthefamily.info/wordpress said it was “deeply concerned by the omission from the encyclical letter Laudato Si of a reaffirmation of the Church’s teaching against contraception and on procreation as the primary end of the sexual act”.
The group claims the Pope’s failure to reiterate Church teaching on the use of contraception “leaves Catholics ill-prepared to resist the international population control agenda”.
With Voice of the Family co-founder John Smeaton arguing that “Catholic parents must resist all attacks on our children, even when they emanate from within the Vatican”, the group specifically criticises Prof. Hans Schellnhuber, one of those who presented the encyclical to the press. It paints the new member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences as a population control advocate, despite his observation at the encyclical’s launch that it is a myth that population control is needed to address climate change, insisting that “contrary to what some have claimed, it is not the mass of poor people that destroys the planet, but the consumption of the rich”.
A gift to humanity
Among the many more positive responses to Laudato Si is that of Gillan Scott at archbishopcranmer.com, recognising that “what Pope Francis is able to do is provide a moral framework which fuses science with faith in a way that is impossible to ignore,” adding, “it is so compelling and broad in its scope that even for those who profoundly disagree with the science of climate change, there is enough to justify intervention purely through the call to love each other and our planet”.
For Tim Stanley, writing at telegraph.co.uk, “Laudato Si is a gift to humanity”, a visionary document in which “while apparently talking about one sole aspect of existence, Francis comments upon the meaning of life itself”.
Calling the encyclical “a Rerum Novarum for our age: a spiritual answer to material agonies”, Stanley says the document is “unblemished by partisan politics”, with lessons and challenges for both left and right.
Seamless garment
The loudest voices against the encyclical have been politicians on the US right, but as Elizabeth Stoker Breunig points out on newrepublic.com, many of these are far from convincing when they claim that faith and politics shouldn’t mix.
“These politicians appear to have no principled objection to religious reasoning governing aspects of political action,” she says, noting that for them “the objection that Church and state should scarcely mingle only arises when religion becomes inconvenient to capital, as in the case of Francis’ entire papacy”.
The encyclical is, she says, no less challenging to those on the left, explaining that Pope Francis is trying to stress the unity of Christian morality: “In every aspect of the created order, he suggests, there is a single purpose, a single plan at work. Our task as humanity is to follow it, and to flourish.”