When I was fourteen, one of our cows gave birth, but the afterbirth did not come out.  The men stood around and moaned and groaned about the afterbirth that wouldn't come out until I got so tired of listening to them that I walked up to the cow, put my arm in past my elbow, and pulled the damn thing out.

I took a step back, wiped my filthy hand on my filthy shirt, turned around, and saw all these men puking.

Readers will forgive me for remembering this nauseating experience when they reflect that I too read the news.

As a Catholic, what disgusts me more than any of the other disgusting events of the last few weeks is not the encyclical calling for an end to freedom and prosperity and for rule by tyrannical world authorities under the tutelage of the author of the encyclical.  No, the worst of it is that so many bishops, priests, and laypeople excuse the inexcusable. 

“The Pope’s critics are acting like children,” screams a headline in the Catholic Herald.  “The environmental encyclical makes us squirm because it exposes our greed and recklessness with the powerful searchlight of the Gospel,” reads the pull quote.  Of course, the Catholic Herald does not really squirm: it thinks critics should squirm because their greed and recklessness have been exposed.

Excusers of the encyclical attribute all criticism of it to bases motives.  The Catholic Herald continues:

He [Francis] is not entering into an argument with the self-interested opponents of the science.  Instead, he simply exposes their views to the radiance of Gospel teaching, and, like the rich young man and the Pharisees and Sadducees, they cannot bear its brilliance.

If you do not believe that what President Obama or the United Nations or Pope Francis advocates will actually help either the environment or the poor, you are “self-interested,” “rich,” a Pharisee or a Sadducee, someone who cannot bear the light. 

The encyclical calls for “dialogue,” but the Catholic Herald certainly does not want a dialogue and does not think that Francis does, either.  “He is not entering into an argument with the self-interested opponents of the science.”  There you have it.   No dialogue with self-interested opponents, and all opponents are self-interested.

“Anti-capitalism activist Naomi Klein … praised Pope Francis for standing up to Republicans” at a “high-level conference at the Holy See.”

“I do believe that given the attacks that are coming from the Republican Party and fossil fuel interests in the U.S. it was a particularly courageous decision to invite me here,” Klein, who lives in Canada, told journalists at the Vatican.  “It indicates that the Holy See is not being intimidated and knows that when you say powerful truths, you make some powerful enemies.”

So now I am rich and powerful.  How did I miss that?

She was speaking alongside Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who described the current environmental situation as “one of the biggest global crises of our time.”

“From this perspective, the encyclical is quite clear that the denial of climate change is no longer a quest of scientific truth but it is an effort to protect private interests against those of the common good,” he said.

“Denial of climate change” – “denial,” not “skepticism” – is but “an effort to protect private interests.”  No one is allowed to have an opinion based on anything but greed unless they agree with President Obama, the United Nations, and Pope Francis.

Perhaps a little embarrassed by the many misstatements of fact in the encyclical, excusers reassure us that we don’t have to agree with the scientific part.  But then they turn around and say that global warming is a moral issue, and as Catholics know, the faithful must believe what the papacy says on faith and morals.

“This is an all-embracing moral imperative: to protect and care for both creation, our garden home, and the human person who dwells herein — and to take action to achieve this,” said Cardinal Peter Turkson, who heads the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Read carefully, and you see that the “dialogue” that Francis and his supporters are calling for is not a dialogue between Francis and his critics, but a dialogue between people inside and outside the Church who agree on global warming.  It is a dialogue between the Vatican and the United Nations, among the Church and Naomi Klein and Ottmar Edenhofer, between the Holy Father and the president of the United States.  They all get together and agree that we are evil.

Oh, yes, Francis calls for dialogue.  He is like the liberals who say we need to have a conversation about race.  Try it, and see what happens.  Obama's attorney general said we are cowards because we know better than to enter such a one-sided conversation.  Francis's minions say that we can have a dialogue with Francis as long as we uphold Church teaching – that is, uphold what Francis says.

The haters are taking their cues from the encyclical, which betrays the same hostility to critics.  Francis says we consume too much: "it is not possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries."  We have "harmful habits of consumption."  We have a "habit of wasting and discarding [that] has reached unprecedented levels." 

He says that we are worshipers of a "deified market."  He says we exhibit "indifference" to the plight of refugees, who are fleeing, in his telling, the environmental destruction we are causing, not genocidal maniacs.

The encyclical says five things that are false and five things that are true, and the excusers say, Look, it says true things.  Someone objects to the falsehoods, and they say, See, you don't believe the truths.

Obama says that just because someone doesn't use the n-word doesn't mean he is not a racist.  That is true.  Obama is still a liar.  And the pope is still a man who mistakes his political beliefs for divine wisdom.

Obama, a man Francis much resembles, stood in the pulpit and gave a eulogy that used a lot of religious rhetoric to mask a political objective.  That is what Francis has done. 

Jeannie DeAngelis in American Thinker:

Fresh off a victory lap in the Rose Garden where the #LOVEWINS president narcissistically defined agreeing with him as “love,” President Obama segued from LGBTQ rights into racial rancor and Biblical misrepresentation during a eulogy where he also defined “God’s grace” as agreeing with him.

Obama and Francis are men who began with great acclaim because people thought them to be men they are not.  They thought Obama was post-racial and Francis humble.  George W. Bush was the post-racial one.  He thought that black children needed high expectations, just like white children.  Benedict was the humble one, so humble that he thought, falsely, it turned out, that the papacy would be all right without him.

The president says that slavery and segregation are not truly over, that racism just won't come out of America.  The Holy Father says there is too much sin in the world, particularly in America.  I say, stop all your whining, put your arm in past your elbow, and pull it out.  I once knew a boy who could do it.