Father Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute has a superb reflection on Pope Francis’ new encyclical Laudato Si’, in which the pontiff discusses global warming and related implications for humanity.

Fr. Sirico welcomes the Pope’s call for honest respectful discussion, and he praises the pontiff’s rejection of overpopulation “science” and the use of atrocities like abortion to advance the environmentalist agenda. Fr. Sirico takes issue, rightfully in my view, with the Pope’s implicit denigration of capitalism and the Holy Father’s unwillingness to admit that free markets have proven beyond doubt to be the most effective economic system for raising the living standards of the poor. It is just a fact, on a par with heliocentrism (to invoke a common phrase of our Darwinian interlocutors), that capitalism alleviates the economic suffering of the poor far more effectively than socialism.

I am both pleased and disturbed by the Pope’s encyclical. The Pope rightfully points out our obligation to care for the earth and rightfully rejects population control. And I do share some of the Pontiff’s concerns about capitalism. Despite — or because — of its remarkable effectiveness in bettering the material lot of man, capitalism presents man with temptations unlike the temptations inherent to socialism. Both Pyongyang and Monte Carlo degrade man. Grinding poverty and government control of the intimacies of life degrade man, but la dolce vita is a soporific, and offers real and unique dangers to the soul, which is an aspect of man for which the Church has ever more stewardship than the earth. The Pope is right to challenge the frenetic consumption that is so much a hallmark of Western life.

But endorsing global warming science is another matter. The earth hasn’t warmed for 18 years, notwithstanding recent tweaks of the data to disappear the stasis, and other tweaks to evaporate the Medieval Warm Period. Global warming is all about manipulation of data to sell an ideology. And the Pope has, despite his wisdom and good intentions, put the Church in service to that ideology.

What ideology? The ideology of scientific apocalyptics. The ideology that science has revealed hidden dangers of global scale, dangers invariably a consequence of human flourishing.

The first scientific apocalypse was Malthusianism, which has the distinction of being the modern scientific theory perhaps most widely hyped and most thoroughly disproven. Malthusianism is the deadliest ideology of modernity. It motivated the British to let the “overpopulated” Irish starve in the 1840s, and to let “overpopulated” impoverished India perish by the millions in the famines of the 1870s. It motivated draconian birth control policies in China and India and Peru since the latter half of the 20th century, which has killed hundreds of millions of Asian children through infanticide and abortion. There are a hundred million “missing” women in Asia today because of Malthusian overpopulation science — the largest femicide in human history.

Scientific apocalyptics motivated the brutal banning of DDT by developed nations in developing nations, leading to a resurgence of malaria and other insect-borne diseases (long since eradicated by pesticides in the developed world) that has killed 50 million people in the past half-century.

And of course scientific apocalyptics was the root (along with Darwinism) of the eugenic atrocities committed in Germany and the United States during the first half of the 20th century.

Global warming science is the continuation of these same scientific policies by other means. The poor need development — electricity and industry — not callous impediments to flourishing imposed by supercilious environmentalists and green entrepreneurs and governments empowered and enriched by junk science. The creed of global warming science is the same creed of Malthusianism and eugenics and pesticide hysteria: human beings are a pestilence and human flourishing is a sin.

That’s hardly a creed for the Catholic Church to endorse. Yet in embracing global warming science it has done just that, with the (welcome but inadequate) proviso that it has not explicitly endorsed science apocalypses such as overpopulation that have deep blood ties to the current science apocalypse. This error is no doubt by ignorance, but culpable ignorance.

Endorsement of global warming Malthusianism will cost the Church a purgation, which to date has been paid only by the poor and the sterilized and the unnecessarily diseased for the sins of others.

Image by Fran�ois Malan, via Wikipedia.