catholicism

Miscellaneous comments from 18 March 2013

Comments made on the previous Miscellaneous comments page from 4 December 2012 can be found . If you have anything you would like to raise, which is likely to be of interest to our site's visitors, which is not addressed by other articles, please add your comments here . Comments closed on this page. Please add further comments . - Ed, 1 May 2013.

Cardinal Pell is out of touch with reality

Sydney Catholic Archbishop George Pell’s statement that "no Western country is producing enough babies to keep the population stable" is racist and dangerous. It is "Western" countries that are the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, the greatest polluters! Encouraging Australian youth to "populate or perish" is encouraging human arrogance, and ignorance of scientific evidence that points to human-caused climate change. Our population will have more than doubled to 47 million by 2100, but Australia may also have to cope with hundreds of thousands of climate-change refugees. Already we are losing the Murray-Darling river basin and the Great Barrier Reef, and agriculture is threatened. What about lost and threatened species? The Church's anthropocentric attitude has caused the natural world to become a resource to harvest and abuse, along with all the animals. Adding more people at a time when our pockets are being depleted with more costs and charges will burden those who can least afford it. Knowing that it is human pressure on the ecosystem that is causing climate change, we need to aim for zero population growth. The days of "go forth and multiply" are well and truly over, and maybe the Church's relevance too!