‘The Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters.’

In that one sentence, Cardinal Pell puts his finger on what is wrong with Laudato Si‘, Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment. In that document, Francis waded into an argument about climate change and took sides. Moreover, he gave the impression that he was speaking for all Catholics when he did so; and, if by any chance he wasn’t, errant faithful should fall into line.

In an interview in Thursday’s Financial Times, the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy stepped out of line. See above. It was a brave thing to do: Pell’s wholesale reform of the Vatican’s finances is making him plenty of enemies as it is, and now he’s even more vulnerable to attack.
Why take the risk? Because, I suspect, Cardinal Pell considers Laudato Si’ to be the most ill-judged encyclical of modern times. As the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, it is ‘catastrophist’ not just in its climate science but also in its attitude towards modern technology in general:

Its catastrophism also leaves this pope more open to empirical criticism. For instance, he doesn’t grapple sufficiently with evidence that the global poor have become steadily less poor under precisely the world system he decries – a reality that has complicated implications for environmentalism.

But let’s stick with climate change. We’ve moved on, thankfully, from the days when climate scepticism was represented by statistically illiterate Right-wing culture warriors opposed by scientific zealots who were happy to hide inconvenient data to make their case. But the science isn’t ‘settled’; it’s just that the debate has become more sophisticated.

Recently I was talking to a libertarian journalist trained in statistics, a rare beast indeed. I asked him about global warming, expecting a denunciation of Lefty alarmism. Instead, he replied: ‘I just don’t go there – I don’t know enough’, and poured scorn on amateur commentators of every persuasion.

With Laudato Si‘, Pope Francis joined the ranks of those amateurs


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