Article content continued

Non-Catholics responded positively to the Pope’s tweetstorm because he seemed to be taking a firm position on climate change, and the letter certainly does that. But the head of the Catholic religion turns out to be no more capable of expressing himself compactly on one important issue than is the typical adherent of the Environmentalist religion.

The climate is a “common good,” says the Pope, and there is “a very solid scientific consensus” that it is changing in “disturbing” ways. Hooray for Science Pope! But before you know it he is weighing in on drinking water. “…in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market.” It turns out this is bad, even though almost any economist alive would instantly apply a red pencil and several question marks to that “despite.”

Before long Francis is going off on “Decline in the Quality of Human Life and the Breakdown of Society.” Hilariously, there’s a warning about new digital media, presumably in forms like … er, Twitter? They “[give] rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature,” quoth @Pontifex.

One begins to suspect that this ordinary-Joe pope may lack even the ordinary Joe’s normal quantum of irony. The confirmation comes in the section of the encyclical on “Global Inequality,” and, yes, we are wandering pretty far now from atmosphere physics. After a brief discussion of the global poor, the Holy Father gets defensive. “Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different,” he says, “some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate.”