“misguided anthropocentrism”

Whose “New World Order”?

“In what Romano Guardini calls the technocratic paradigm, Francis offers a unifying account of many kinds of insensibility: financiers ignoring the real human lives that lie at the bottom of complex mortgage refinancing schemes, corporate behemoths trashing forests in poor countries in the quest for profit, shareholders driving down wages to maximize returns.

But the paradigm also accounts for the tedious monotony of urban existence, the distance of the state and political elites, the depersonalization of social interaction, the leveling of cultures, the shrinking of community, the failure to recognize the humanity of migrants or the unborn or the disabled, as well as the misanthropic green thinking that wants to reduce the numbers of humans as predators or parasites on the natural world.

It lurks behind the practical moral relativism that flows from what the encyclical calls a “misguided anthropocentrism” that “sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s own immediate interests”:

slavery; sexual abuse; trade in blood diamonds, drugs, and human organs; the mistreatment of the elderly; abortion; and so much else. Laws and regulations cannot alone stem these evils, the pope warns, because when culture is corrupted and universal principles no longer obtain, laws come to be seen as arbitrary impositions or obstacles to be evaded.

Laudato Si’ is apocalyptic both because it unmasks the truth about what we hold as sacred, and also because it exposes human helplessness to solve the crisis by our own means alone.”

— from Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church

Note: if it is not immediately clear, Pope Francis here, like his predecessors, is setting Catholic truths in direct opposition to the general humanistic agenda which violates creation and the sacredness of the human person. For Francis to explicitly and unambiguously oppose abortion, population control, organ harvesting, sexual trafficking, gender ideology, and the mistreatment of the weak and elderly shows that he, like John Paul II and Benedict XVI, is proposing a Globalization very different from the one proposed by Bill Gates and ideologues like him. The Popes in this century have rather proposed a “world order” infused with the perennial spiritual values of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. On route to the apparently same aim as his predecessors, however, Francis sometimes courts scandal which to many seems to contradicts his very intentions. This is a problem for the Church—SH