Pope Francis’s Encyclical: The Movie

June 15, 2015 • 1:00 pm

I remember when Archie Bunker used to talk about the “Pope’s Bicycle” (he also said the Pope was “inflammable”). Archie was of course referring to encyclicals, or letters from the pontiff sent to all Catholic bishops.  You might know that Pope Francis’s Bicycle on Climate Change, due to be published in three days, was leaked to the press and has appeared in the Italian magazine L’Espresso (it’s 192 pages long, so I suspect it’s excerpted).  Apparently it accepts and decries climate change as an anthropogenic phenomenon, and one that weighs most heavily on the poor.

That’s all well and good, but if you don’t have time to read the behemoth document, you can see the precis in this exciting trailer. Apparently it’s going to be an action movie! (According to Grist, this “was created by the Brazilian climate action group Observatório do Clima.”)

Jebus is in there, too!

h/t: David

27 thoughts on “Pope Francis’s Encyclical: The Movie”

  5. I’m betting the pope will miss the point that population control is the greatest single hope for climate control. That won’t happen!!

    2. Population growth is definitely a factor, but the greatest one? I don’t think so.

      Take it from Michael E. Webber:

      “Population growth is indeed important, but it turns out that economic growth is a bigger deal: demand for food, energy and water are growing faster than population because people tend to demand more meat and electricity (both of which are water-intensive) as they are elevated out of poverty. The average Chinese citizen, for instance, consumes about a fourth of the energy of a typical U.S. citizen, and as the former becomes richer, that gap narrows. (Meanwhile urbanization, which reduces birth rates, is increasing.)

      Therefore, making sure that people have the energy, water and food they need for a free and prosperous life, without all the environmental and security challenges that plague our old approaches, is the most effective place to start. Plus, the policy levers (investing in new technologies, reinventing markets and pushing for a culture of conservation) for solving this nexus are more straightforward and palatable than population controls, which are objectionable on many levels.”

      http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/readers-respond-to-ldquo-inside-the-neandertal-mind-rdquo/

      1. Also there is the strong correlation between standard of living and average number of children per family. If you are able to tackle the problem of raising the poor of the world there is very good reason to think that the rate of population growth will decline as that occurs.

        As you probably know already, many western countries are near, some even below, replacement rate. Even more if you control for immigration.

  6. That trailer is hilarious! I thought it was great fun. I think it’s great a pope, any pope, is actually doing something good with his power, instead making ignorant statements about condoms and HIV/AIDS.

    The conservative wing are going to have to take a good hard look at themselves too, and with a bit of luck it might even slow down their prurient pronouncements. Of course, the usual f**kwits have already come out against this.

    Rick Santorum thinks the Pope should listen to the scientists on this. It seems to me that’s exactly what the Pope is doing – like many Americans, he doesn’t realize that most scientists accept anthropogenic climate change. And I’m not making that up – there is a Pew poll about the difference in the US between what scientists accept and what the general public think they accept on a number of issues, and this is one of them.

    1. I have doubts that Rick Santorum doesn’t realize that there is a very strong consensus among relevant scientists about GCC. He is a LSOS. You can tell when he is lying because his mouth will begin to move.

      Delivering lines that take the exact opposite of reality to be a given, and with well practiced honest conviction, is a time honored tactic and is Santorum’s stock in trade.

      1. “You can tell when he is lying because his mouth will begin to move.”

        Great line! 🙂

  8. As they say, you have to meet people — in this case, religious climate change deniers — where they are.

    Let us hope, though, they won’t dismiss the whole project as pure comedy.

    1. Let’s not forget that for many Protestants in America, the Catholic Church is “The Whore of Babylon.” An encyclical like this will only serve to reinforce their views that the Church is the work of Satan.

  10. We used to hear the conservative Catholics cheer on the Vatican and the Pope when they agreed with the decrees being issued. Now we hear them squeal like cut pigs as Pope Frank issues Encyclicals that run contrary to their personal worldview. If they want to believe that they have the right to make their own faith-based decisions on such matters, then they need to leave the Catholic Church and become Protestant Evangelicals who can make up their own twisted sh!t based on how they “interpret” the Bible.

    1. N-deG-T is fine until the last bit where he says he doesn’t argue with politicians – then, he’s the one in denial. Politicians have a huge influence on whether the electorate is informed. They form educational policies, they allow the media oligopoly that is little more than a propaganda machine to flourish.

  12. Given that the Pope’s boss once flooded the entire world and has been credited with other atmospheric phenomena, the Pope probably has inside knowledge.

  14. …Archie Bunker used to talk about the “Pope’s Bicycle” (he also said the Pope was “inflammable”).

    Archie B. was certainly a master of malaprop. The king, however, was Norm Crosby, who built an entire career on one-trick schtick.

    The best malapropisms in recent memory came from “Little Carmine” Lupertazzi, the son of the NY crime boss on The Sopranos. His lines would make me laugh so hard on Sunday nights, I’d sometimes end up coughing macaroni and gravy out of my nose.

  16. If the excerpt appears in L’Espresso then surely it must be incredibly short, so you can finish it in a few seconds. But it still gives a decent kick.

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