There are few events in the Australian media as simultaneously sad and hilarious as an extended tantrum from the Australian. While our national broadsheet’s recent focus has been on confecting outrage about Q&A, its hysterical response to Pope Francis’s second encyclical has flown under the radar.

With Laudato Si’ Pope Francis has called on the world to act to prevent catastrophic environmental destruction, and in the process challenged some of the political right’s most cherished beliefs.

The right has long welcomed the role of the Catholic church as a conservative bulwark against the insidious influence of the left. It has been an ally both socially (in warning against such horrors as sexual liberation, homosexuality, abortion and divorce) and economically (in backing capitalism and the western world throughout the cold war).

Since Pope Francis, the alliance has been shown to be less natural than we might have thought. Among hardline neoliberals, no one is allowed to question the sanctity of the market – not even the pontiff himself. Yet now many conservative Catholic stalwarts are discovering that the church’s institutional power, and the weight of its tradition, might not necessarily be for their political use.

These discoveries played out in the Australian’s coverage, which was kicked off by its environment editor, Graham Lloyd. Amid a collection of key points from the encyclical, Lloyd quotes a media release from James Grant, Catholic priest and adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, reassuring Catholics that they “can feel safe in being sceptical about the pope’s opinion”.

Yes, a Catholic priest working for a climate denialist thinktank issued a media release telling Catholics how they should react to the pope’s views about climate change.



Lloyd’s article was accompanied by a short comment piece from Tess Livingstone, biographer and admirer of George Pell and board member of the conservative publisher Connor Court.

Livingstone confidently predicts that “mass unemployment … would follow the contraction in consumer demand called for in the encyclical”. Returning to the topic at greater length the following day, she complains that Francis “has tied the church to environmentalists well on the left of the political spectrum”.



She was joined by Angela Shanahan, who often uses her weekly column to rail against the liberalisation of Catholic doctrine since the second Vatican council. Shanahan has found the pontificate of Francis particularly troubling.

In this instance, she questions whether “climate change is always an oppressive thing for the poor” and goes on to speculate whether Francis’s papacy “for health reasons might not last much longer than another four years”.

Her husband Dennis, in his role as political editor, accuses Tony Abbott’s critics of hypocrisy in their calls for him to follow the advice of his religious leader, having in the past subjected him to “vitriolic political attacks over his Catholic beliefs”.



There was also a brief report from Tessa Akerman, informing us that government ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt had praised the pope’s message. But on scientific matters she turned to none other than Abbott’s business adviser Maurice Newman, he of “global cooling” and conspiracy theories about “a new world order under the control of the UN”.

Newman helpfully advised that there is no empirical evidence that carbon emissions are changing the climate, and that being kind to the environment “does not mean carte blanche we shut down our entire civilisation”. What a relief.



Nick Cater, executive director of the Liberal party’s Menzies Research Centre, later chimed in with his take on “Pope Francis the Handwringer”. Then came Paul Kelly, whose occasional hyperbolic outbursts belie his reputation as the sober, sensible “professor” of Australian journalism.

Kelly argues the encyclical “is a moral vindication of the left, remarkable in its sweep and intensity” which “reveals Francis and his advisers as environmental populists and economic ideologues of a quasi-Marxist bent”. Worst of all, “for Tony Abbott and his Catholic backers this document offers only a relentless repudiation of their ethical framework and policies”.



For those concerned at this point that things had become a little one-sided, Denis Hart, the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, was allowed some space in the weekend edition to explicitly reject the ranting of Kelly (and, it appears, to give the impression of balance).

In the meantime, the campaign continued. Gerard Henderson, Australia’s foremost chronicler of anti-Catholic sectarianism (both real and perceived), echoed Dennis Shanahan’s concerns about hypocritical attacks on the prime minister. Business columnist Terry McCrann described the encyclical as “a very bad example of feel-good nonsense from a dark green teenage enthusiast”.



Finally, the coup de grâce: a rambling 1,400-word editorial in the Weekend Australian that one presumes was intended as the “urgent rebuttal” the encyclical so richly deserved. Sprinkled with questionable statistics and bizarre assertions (massive global population growth since 1980 is apparently “a sign of economic confidence”), the editorial matches any of the aforementioned columns for hyperbole, denouncing the pope for swallowing “a new, pernicious dogma, that of the anti-development, anti-free market global green movement.”

Unless it is returned to the “sensible centre of the political spectrum”, thundered the editorial, the church risked becoming irrelevant.



As Pope Francis embarks on a new crusade, calling into question the notion of infinite economic growth and recognising climate change as an issue of utmost importance, the right – hardwired with neoliberal dogma and infected with climate denialism – feels betrayed. It’s almost as if they can’t countenance the idea of a source of authority higher than themselves.

Hence the week-long frenzy of arrogant condemnation and denial, which canvassed the widest possible range of responses: Catholics don’t need to engage with the encyclical; Abbott doesn’t either. The economics in the document are wrong; so is the climate science. Even if the science is right, environmental degradation might not always be a bad thing; if it is a bad thing, it’s not as bad as it was under communism. Anyway, the pope isn’t qualified to talk about economics or science to begin with.

By the way, the encyclical is also too flippant, feel-good and juvenile; at the same time, its repudiation of the conservative worldview is too comprehensive. It’s quasi-Marxist dogma, feel-good nonsense from the left; but here’s the archbishop of Melbourne, not exactly a radical, to defend it.

While an organisation as resistant to change as the Catholic church recognises the damage wrought by unchecked economic expansion, how can the response of the Australian right be called anything other than a collective dummy spit?