Unholy water

The Vatican PR team have been the source of great excitement of late. Sometime ago, probably long before Pope Francis died, the decision was taken to host a climate justice event. It was meant to challenge climate sceptics. It came from Greenland, specifically the Nuup Kangerlua Fjord.

Whose bright woke and vibrant idea was this?

It was organised by the Laudato Si Movement, and supported by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and Dicastery for Communication.

You may not have heard much about either dicastery, or the Laudate Si Movement. Basically, this is where the Vatican keeps its climate-scare activists: the movement is all about justice peace migration and development. They are the Vatican equivalent of the Just Stop Oil protesters.

They decided they wanted to shock climate sceptics and would use the Pope to do it by asking him to bless a block of melting ice which would represent the apocalyptic state of climate injustice and exacerbate global fear in order to encourage economic change.

No wonder poor Leo looked so bewildered as they wheeled him in and moved him about the stage around the block of ice, giving him a few prayers on a card to direct towards this chunk of Greenland melt.

It seems a bit unfair, when looked at it from this perspective, that the poor Pope is getting it in the neck from absolutely everybody. It is assumed that this was his gig. But of course, it was nothing to do with him personally.

In fact, if there is a lesson to be learnt from this for Catholics, it is the extent to which Pope Leo is a prisoner of the system. A group of ecologically and neurotically angst-ridden climate activists managed to get the Pope’s secretary to get this event into his diary to come and give a blessing.

It shouldn’t really have caused so much fuss that the Pope was blessing water. There is an ongoing rich and vibrant tradition of blessing holy water within the Catholic Church. Why should it matter if it was in the process of melting, having been frozen? Can the Pope not bless frozen water?

The reason it caused so much excitement was because the Vatican's left-wing eco-warriors were jubilant that they had captured the Pope for their “Lets-terrify-the-global-warming-deniers” campaign. While the Right were outraged that the Pope was not blessing water at room temperature but some symbolic chunk of ice instead, and wondered what the theological significance could be, if any?

And in the middle of this political and theological outrage was poor Pope Leo XIV who had simply turned up to some Vatican event to give a papal blessing, and wandered once more into a supercharged political controversy not of his own making.

There are both political and theological points to be made. None of them really concern the Pope himself.

The Laudato Si Movement is essentially a secular climate alarmist campaign group which has hijacked the mystical theology of Saint Francis without understanding it or even wanting to understand it.

To understand the relationship of Saint Francis to creation and the created order, to animals flowers, brother Fire and sister Water, you would have to understand how he saw Jesus at the centre of the whole of creation.

Colossians 1 explains it:

“For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. And He is the head of the body, the Church; He is the beginning and firstborn from among the dead, so that in all things He may have pre-eminence … ”

He loved things, animate and inanimate, because they were held together in and by and for Jesus.

He wrote in one of his prayers, “I beg you, Lord, let the fiery and sweet strength of your love absorb my soul from all things that are under heaven, that I may die for love of your love, as you deigned to die for love of my love.”

This is not the spirituality of a mediaeval ecologist, but of a mediaeval mystical saint profoundly in love with Jesus. If the Laudato Si Movement had wanted to invoke Saint Francis in that ceremony inspired by him, all the words, all the symbolism, all the hope would’ve led straight back to Jesus.

What actually seems to have happened is that the eschatological hope in Jesus has been detached from the Holy Trinity and reattached to Gaia in anxious celebration and care for wounded mother Earth. The incantations of hope that followed the Pope’s brief and rightly constructed Trinitarian blessing, appeared to be hope for the recovery of the wounded creation, but without any reference to the wounded creator.

No blame should be attached to Leo for blessing frozen if melting water. The Catholic delight in blessing water, which is so rich in theological nuance and practice, is not affected by the temperature of the water.

What made the outcome unholy rather than holy was the detachment of the chunk of Greenland ice from anything obviously connected to Jesus, at least in the minds of the activists.

If there is any lesson in this episode, it is a PR lesson. Keep the Pope away from the Left-leaning justice-fixated, equality-seeking political activists and their dicasteries.

Let him alone, to be a father in God to penitent pilgrims, seeking the grace of the Catholic Sacramental life.

The papal charge is “feed my sheep”, not “platform my activists”. That’s a different religion.

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Photo: graphic by Arcadia

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