Guest Post: Thomas McFadden and More Wokeness in the Diocese of Arlington

From Mrs Kreitzer's introduction, 'The Church has become a huge part of the problem by embracing woke (and extremely profitable) positions that mirror the godless left.'

From Les Femmes

By Mary Ann Kreizer

My friend, Tom McFadden, offers insightful commentary on the latest woke activities in the Diocese of Arlington on global warming/climate change. I've lived long enough to see hand-wringing leftists proved entirely wrong again and again. Paul Ehrlich predicted in the 1960's that the world would be devastated before the end of the 20th century by a "population bomb" that turned out to be a dud. Did that destroy him as a prophet of doom? Of course not! The Vatican invited the evil pro-abortion bug scientist to participate in a conference on "biodiversity." The Church has become a huge part of the problem by embracing woke (and extremely profitable) positions that mirror the godless left.

God never made a baby that He didn't plan to care for. Starvation, famine, war...they are all the work of evil men, not God. Just one example, the COVID lockdowns caused devastation worldwide. Farmers had crops they could not harvest that rotted in the fields. Millions were denied treatment for COVID. It caused vast numbers of unnecessary deaths. Why? Because they (government and Big Pharma) wanted to mandate the experimental gene-therapy that is killing many in the prime of life. And now we face the threat of nuclear war because of the U.S. policy on Ukraine which threatens not only our own security but is condemning Europe to a devastating winter with rolling blackouts. Pray for the world. Things are not looking good. As Pope St. Pius V said, "All the evils of the world are due to lukewarm Catholics."

And now listen to Tom McFadden --

The current issue of the Arlington Catholic Herald reports on the Diocesan Peace and Justice Commission's presentation of pseudo-science, climate hysteria, anti-capitalism and earth-based spirituality by representatives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' "Green Machine", a.k.a. the Catholic Climate Covenant.

https://catholicclimatecovenant.org/

Bishop Burbidge, who, according to the Herald a couple of years ago, signed the USCCB's climate manifesto, celebrated mass to "kick off the event." According to the Herald our Bishop's homily combined pleasant truisms with doubtful economic assertions apparently based on the "new theology" of the Pope. "We care about our common home because it is a gift from our creator," he said in his homily. "Pope Francis calls us to approach nature and the environment with awe and wonder, for then our care for it will well up spontaneously." Bishop Burbidge also noted that climate change most impacts the poor. "On the day God calls us to himself, we will be accountable to the extent that we have shared our resources properly with others."

I don't know what he meant by "our care of it" but the choice of the keynote speaker, whose agenda is known, provided clarity. The key speaker at the event was Dan Misleh, a Jesuit-educated, career-long church bureaucrat with the USCCB and founder of its Catholic Climate Covenant. 

According to Misleh, "That same extra heat that evaporates more water from the oceans causing bigger downpours and floods, is also causing more droughts" and "that has led to rising sea levels, more fires, storms and mudslides."

While his assertions are not evidence-based nor logically consistent they seem to have been delivered with enough panache to impress his audience. What was more problematic was his spiritual direction:

As faith people, we need to see the spiritual and the social responsibility for what is happening.... We have all the tools we need in the Catholic Church, but what we need is a movement.

The movement that Misleh seems to want is based on one that will reduce everyone's standard of living because of sky high energy costs that will lead to famine and rationing. He seems to be an ideologue and part of the Green Movement of the Biden Administration. 

While economists and honest commentators have lamented that the recently signed law, the Inflation Reduction Act, will exacerbate inflation, the USCCB has nothing but cheers for it because it is essentially a "climate change" funding boondoggle. Here is the USCCB's approval with praise for the Act which could have been written for the Bishops by AOC and Pelosi.

https://catholicclimatecovenant.org/news/statement-catholic-climate-covenants-executive-director-jose-aguto-house-passage-ira

Misleh's convoluted thinking was displayed in a 2011 article in the left-wing magazine U. S. Catholic entitled "Don't be crude: End our oil addiction." According to Misleh in 2011, "It's time to get the petroleum monkey off our backs." For more than 10 years he has led the Bishops' anti-fossil fuel lobby with Congress. He alleges that because petroleum is so essential to our way of life and prosperity we are in some way guilty of something because "our individual per capita consumption of the world’s energy dwarfs all other countries, even the most developed. Our 4.5 percent share of the world’s population consumes 25 percent of its energy.... But having traveled to some desperately poor countries, I also know that we are the few and the privileged. Most of the rest of the world has little if any access to fossil fuel energy."

It is not clear how reducing U.S. fossil fuel development as the Green Machine advocates in favor of more Chinese-made solar panel and windmill deployment will provide those "desperately poor countries" with more "access to fossil fuel energy." Misleh's rhetoric appeals to virtue- signaling bishops. It makes them feel they are "acting for the poor" without actually giving up the benefits that fossil fuel energy permits them to enjoy. They don't see the hypocrisy that some laymen might attribute to them because in the U.S. laymen observe that the bishops seem to imbibe in more of the conveniences of American life than most of the working class pewsitters without experiencing the burden of how to pay for the necessities of life for themselves and their children. 

One wonders to whom Bishop Burbidge was addressing his warning that "On the day God calls us to himself, we will be accountable to the extent that we have shared our resources properly with others."