✣ Highlights from the week online

  Birds, bugs and zoongs The Vatican’s decision to mark the opening of the Year of Mercy with a message about climate change caused dismay in some quarters. In a show entitled “Illuminating our Common Home”, images of the natural world were projected on to St Peter’s Basilica. Blogger Fr John Zuhlsdorf described it on his blog as “different images of animals, bugs, lizards, birds with the corresponding critter noises, punctuated by sound effects, new age zings and zoongs”. He added: “It’s like the LSD psycho tunnel at the Detroit airport. But... it’s St Peter’s. “What looms on our horizon now?” he asked. “Holy Mary, innocent of carbon footprint... pray for us. Holy Mary, conceived without climate change... pray for us. This has gone beyond ridiculous.” LifeSite news responded with a petition to the Vatican, entitled “I oppose use of St Peter’s for ‘climate change’ light show”, which gathered 4,000 signatures. Rorate Caeli, the traditionalist site, described the light show as a “neo-pagan obscenity for the feast of the Immaculate” and noted that, while “the heart of Christianity, transformed on a maxi-screen for the show of the New World Power Ideology”, the Nativity crib “was left in darkness”. Meanwhile Fr Ray Blake challenged the Pope to push his green lifestyle to new boundaries. “It would be too easy to dismiss Laudato Si’ as being window dressing, but a start would be for the Holy Father to abandon air travel,” Fr Blake wrote. “It is fine for the Pope to use small cars but what a tremendous sign if he abandoned fossil-fuel transport altogether ... I am sure there are new technologies that the Holy Father could highlight. The Vatican City is made for the electric car, and if the Holy Father must travel abroad there is ‘slow flight technology’.” Elephant in the Vatican Churchpop.com claimed that the elephant whose bones were found under the Vatican shortly before the Second Vatican Council, sparked the Reformation. According to the Churchpop editor, the elephant possibly determined the course of history. “Pope Leo X was known for having an overly extravagant papal court, including, among other things, regularly throwing lavish masquerades at the Vatican. Soon-to-be Protestant reformers were already angry at the Church, but the fact the pope now had a special pet elephant from India named Hanno was viewed as the perfect over-the-top example of how corrupt the papacy had become. “Just one year after the elephant’s death, Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses. One historian writes that Hanno the elephant ‘formed the basis for one of the first published criticisms levelled against him by German supporters of Martin Luther’.”