The moral voter: Bishop offers guidance to faithful Catholic voters

[Ender]

I give more credence to the Pontifical Academy than a single study put out by an oil company.

First, the Pontifical Academy has said nothing whatever on the topic raised by the study. Second, the study was published in the very prestigious journal Geophysical Research Letters; this is not an “oil company” study. Third, even if an oil company had paid for the research that would in no way invalidate it. Studies deserve to be addressed, not ignored.

Particulate and certain molecules reflect solar radiation back into the atmosphere…

Good, this is the proper way to respond. “The church is always right about matters of science” is not.

You obviously searched for an article that seemed to support your opinion, right?

Actually, no. I didn’t search at all, I just ran into it. I told you, I read things.

Because you already have a mindset that 97% of the climatologists are wrong.

To start with I don’t believe that 97% of climatologists agree one way or the other; that’s actually a ludicrous proposition, but I don’t think it reasonable to form a scientific opinion based on which side has more advocates. That’s not very scientific.

 

[upant]

I’ll let you look that up. 97% of climatologists agree with the basic conclusions.

I provided the data for the 97% number, it is wrong.

This thread is about guiding the faithful with their vote, and the faithful generally value the guidance from the Magisterium.

I also showed you the bishops voted down the McElroy addition. their pre-eminent priority is abortion.

I have no reason to believe it is wrong.

you discounted it above

The bishops did not deny the importance of global climate change.

climate change is a fact but the whys and wherefores are subject to debate. It doesn’t carry the same weight as abortion.

 

[OneSheep]

Third, even if an oil company had paid for the research that would in no way invalidate it.

Readers can view the study and its conclusions in the same way that they would read a lung cancer study funded by RJ Reynolds or some other cigarette company.

Studies deserve to be addressed, not ignored.

In the news today there are reports about how we have indeed lowered greenhouse gasses, but not as much as we had agreed to in the Paris Accords.

“ The church is always right about matters of science ”

I never said that. I said that we rely on the Church to discern best moral action, and best moral action sometimes involves knowing some science, with medicine being the most predominant example. In this case, the Pontifical Academy looked at a different field of science. We have faith that the Spirit guides the Church.

Actually, no. I didn’t search at all, I just ran into it. I told you, I read things.

So, since that source did not negate the finding that human activity is worsening global climate change, do you have one that does?

And since you “read things”, how many studies that support the findings of the majority of climatologists do you read before finding one that agrees with what you want to be true?

I also showed you the bishops voted down the McElroy addition. their pre-eminent priority is abortion.

Yes, I am hopeful that the latest replacement happens, and we can come up with new solutions to the abortion problem. If Amy Barrett gets on, the pressure is off to elect a president who will pick a pro-life judge.

you discounted it above

Only because I am very wary of a climate study funded by an oil company.

climate change is a fact but the whys and wherefores are subject to debate. It doesn’t carry the same weight as abortion.

Climate change may carry more weight for Catholic voters once Amy Barrett is on the bench. It will be very good to have a woman in there arguing against Roe v. Wade. I am envisioning (praying) that the justices will replace it with something else that drives congress to put a great deal of money into either moving unborn children into a new mother or some other scientific or social means of saving the unwanted unborn. Also what is needed is sound education about the humanity of unborn children.

 

[Motherwit]

Just an an example of the calibre of expert contributing to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Pope Francis names leading physicist to pontifical academy​

The Holy See press office said Sept. 29 that the pope had named Fabiola Gianotti as an “ordinary member” of the academy.

Gianotti, an Italian experimental particle physicist, is the first female director-general of CERN, which operates the world’s largest particle accelerator at its laboratory on the border between France and Switzerland.

Last year, Gianotti became the first director-general since CERN was founded in 1954 to be re-elected for a second full five-year term.

On July 4, 2012, she announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, sometimes referred to as the “God particle,” whose existence was first predicted by the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs in the 1960s.

 

[upant]

as much as we had agreed to in the Paris Accords.

yet we are doing better than those who still push it

Yes, I am hopeful that the latest replacement happens, and we can come up with new solutions to the abortion problem. If Amy Barrett gets on, the pressure is off to elect a president who will pick a pro-life judge.

agreed

Climate change may carry more weight for Catholic voters once Amy Barrett is on the bench. It will be very good to have a woman in there arguing against Roe v. Wade. I am envisioning (praying) that the justices will replace it with something else that drives congress to put a great deal of money into either moving unborn children into a new mother or some other scientific or social means of saving the unwanted unborn. Also what is needed is sound education about the humanity of unborn children.

agreed (with most, not sure on moving, this I would wait for the position of the church)

 

[stpurl]

16 characters in search of an author

 

[Motherwit]

16 characters in search of an author

These sites often only cite ‘staff’ as author. That’s not uncommon.

 

[Ender]

Readers can view the study and its conclusions in the same way that they would read a lung cancer study funded by RJ Reynolds or some other cigarette company.

Or they could start with the Acknowledgments section and find what you are spectacularly unable to acknowledge: there was no connection with an evil gas company.

This research was support by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant 2019YFA0606800), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 41975159), and Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology (special funding about meteorological impacts on virus spreading). We thank the Nanjing ZTweather Technology Co., Ltd. for providing data used for model evaluation. H. Wang was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER), Earth and Environmental System Modeling (EESM) program. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE‐AC05‐76RLO1830.

In the news today there are reports about how we have indeed lowered greenhouse gasses, but not as much as we had agreed to in the Paris Accords.

The Paris Accords were all fluff.

“According to the latest annual UN report on the “emissions gap,” the Paris agreement will provide only a third of the cuts in greenhouse gas that environmentalists claim is needed to prevent catastrophic warming. If every country involved in those accords abides by their pledges between now and 2030 — which is a dubious proposition — temperatures will still rise by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100. The goal of the Paris agreement was to keep the global temperature increase to under 2 degrees.”

“ The church is always right about matters of science ”

I never said that…We have faith that the Spirit guides the Church.

If the Spirit guides the church in matters of science then the church would always be right about matters of science, which is essentially your claim.

…how many studies that support the findings of the majority of climatologists…

I don’t presume to know what the majority of climatologists believe. I know what the IPCC believes, and I know what the media believes, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t what “the majority” of scientists believe since theirs are political claims, not scientific ones.

 

[stpurl]

You misunderstood. I posted in error and then made a pun on a Pirandello play “Six Characters in Search of an Author” by putting ‘16 characters” as they won’t allow any post with fewer than 16 characters.

 

[OneSheep]

This research was support by

My apologies, I got confused between the story that you brought up and the story that another poster put forth. I don’t see oil companies as supporting the study you brought up.

The study you cited made sense, but the abstract was misleading. You were confused, and the ordinary reader would be confused without seeing the whole picture.

That said, at least the researchers did not contest the general consensus that humans are making global climate change worse by putting pollutants in the atmosphere.

The Paris Accords were all fluff.

Well, the Catholic Church disagrees with you. It needs more work, but it was a step in the right direction. The first step is cooperation, which is what happened in the Paris Accords. Catholic voters should consider important that world leaders cooperate in reversing the climate problem.

If the Spirit guides the church in matters of science then the church would always be right about matters of science, which is essentially your claim.

As Catholics, we trust that the Spirit guides the Church.

I don’t presume to know what the majority of climatologists believe

It might be worthwhile to do some reading! If not, if you are Catholic you can trust that the Spirit is guiding the Magisterium.

 

[stpurl]

So you mean that during the several decades of the Arian crisis, when the priests and bishops were teaching and declaring heresy to the people, since the Spirit was guiding the Church it’s all ok. I mean, hey, after all, a couple of generations later the heresy was gone. . .oh wait, it didn’t go away on its own. We had one courageous bishop who then convinced another. . .we had the laity rise up and refuse to consider the ‘new teaching’.

So maybe today the Spirit is guiding us to ‘hold fast’. To push back. To reject wrong teachings and proclaim the Truth. Maybe now, just as then, there will be even those in power who are going the wrong way and even teaching wrong teachings, and the Spirit will have them resisted and maybe years after you and I are gone the Spirit will have guided the people back to Truth.

Yes, the Spirit is guiding the Church. That doesn’t mean that at any given point any individual or individuals within the Church might not go ‘off the rails’ and that wrongs which have spread might not have to be righted. We don’t live in a magic Spirit Bubble where we can chant, “no matter what is going on, it’s all good right now because it’s Spirit led’.

 

[OneSheep]

So you mean that during the several decades of the Arian crisis, when the priests and bishops were teaching and declaring heresy to the people, since the Spirit was guiding the Church it’s all ok

Absolutely, the Spirit was guiding the Church. All “heresies” have some truth to them, and all of them end up having some element incorporated into Christian theology. But theology is not the same as morality. The Spirit guides the Church in its moral precepts. Yes, individuals in the Church have been incorrect in their moral behaviors, but as a whole, the Spirit guides the Church.

Are you disagreeing with the moral teachings of the Magisterium?

 

[stpurl]

I don’t disagree, but from your post you have a very different understanding of Catholicism. Really, “all heresies have some truth to them. . .get incorporated in?” Sorry, no and no there. But it explains why you have the incorrect understanding of Spirit and Magisterium.

 

[OneSheep]

It’s not the specific heresies that necessarily have truth in them, it is that all movements in the early Church had some truth in them, and sometimes also made heretical statements that were discarded by the Church.

What I said about the Magisterium stands. The Spirit guides the Church in moral matters.

The Arian controversy does not negate this. Yes, there were priests and bishops teaching something that afterwards was clarified, but these were not issues of moral behavior. In addition, those involved in Arianism were not the Magisterium. Arianism took place very early in the Church’s history, when many aspects of theology were being sorted out.

 

[Ender]

Well, the Catholic Church disagrees with you.

No, you and some individual bishops may agree, but there is no church doctrine about the Paris Accords. Whether it is good or bad is a purely prudential judgment.

As Catholics, we trust that the Spirit guides the Church.

This is a bit disingenuous. What you say is absolutely true, but what you imply by it is not. The debate has never been over whether or not the Spirit guides the church on faith and morals; rather it has been about whether she is guided on matters of science, and to that question you have provided really nothing to substantiate that claim.

I think this entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia, however, is pertinent:

The mathematical and experimental sciences, also known as exact sciences, have no contact whatever with faith…

 

[stpurl]

You conveniently forget that it’s ‘faith and morals’ not simply morals, friend.

What you are suggesting faintly hints of a kind of indifferentism and relativism which is emphatically not Catholic at all. You seem to imply that all kinds of elements, including heresy, are ‘subsiding’ in the Catholic faith whereby the Church picks out and chooses from the so-called ‘truth’ in the heresy and even follows along with some heresies until rejecting them. Again, emphatically not Catholic teaching.

 

[OneSheep]

What you are suggesting faintly hints of a kind of indifferentism and relativism which is emphatically not Catholic at all

None such hinting implied!

God Bless.

there is no church doctrine about the Paris Accords.

Look! We agree on something!

 

[Ender]

Ender:

there is no church doctrine about the Paris Accords.

Look! We agree on something!

Given that what to do about the Paris Accords is not doctrinal, but rather is a prudential judgment, it was a mistake for Bishop McElroy to assert that leaving them was a great moral evil. That is simply not so. It might be a mistake, but it cannot be a sin, his personal , political view notwithstanding.

 

[stpurl]

No, they did not teach ‘something that was later clarified.’

They taught something that was absolutely 100% wrong. You don’t clarify a wrong, you right it.

“God the Son is not Coequal with God the Father” cannot be clarified to “God the Son IS coequal with God the Father.

It’s a complete and total nonTrinitarian teaching. And the Trinity has always been core in the Catholic Faith.

Heresy always has to be rejected and stamped out; it is never a ‘clarification issue’ and it never morphs into Catholic teaching.

 

[OneSheep]

They taught something that was absolutely 100% wrong. You don’t clarify a wrong, you right it

The truth-part of Arianism was that Jesus Christ was true man. On the flip side, It is my understanding that some of the contemporary Gnostic sects put Jesus as not a human at all, but someone completely God, not an incarnation. The Nicene creed resolved the issue with the language of “True God”, and truly man through incarnation.

I may have remembered this all wrong, but you can see that the Spirit inspired a beautiful resolution! It is hard for us mortals to put our heads around such mysteries, and we can thank Church fathers for putting the whole existence of Christ in the framework of divine mystery.

Given that what to do about the Paris Accords is not doctrinal, but rather is a prudential judgment, it was a mistake for Bishop McElroy to assert that leaving them was a great moral evil. That is simply not so. It might be a mistake, but it cannot be a sin, his personal , political view notwithstanding.

I don’t recall the Bishop pointing out Trump’s move as “sin”, but I see that you do not agree with the Bishop.

I pray that you have come to understand how the Magisterium has reviewed the science, and how we have faith in the Spirit working in the gathering of knowledge and the reasoning behind their teachings.