The Company We Keep

The climate-change crowd seem to be testing the bounds of sanity and, pardon the pun, good taste. A Swedish professor, a certain Magnus Söderlund has suggested that one way to fight climate change – reducing our dependence on carbon-heavy meat products – is to develop a taste for human flesh, that is, cannibalism. Macabre as this already is, I presume he means eating the flesh of those who have already died, and that we don’t start intentional ‘human farms’, for would they not end up being just as carbon-heavy, if not more so, than the cows and pigs which so exercise the brains of such profs? The 1973 dystopic film Soylent Green is proving problematically prophetic. In the inimitable tones of a scandalized Charlton Heston when he discovers what ‘they’ have been feeding people in a world-wide famine, ‘It’s people!!!

And what are we to say of presidential-hopeful Bernie Sanders, a multi-millionaire with a carbon footprint the size of whole regions of Africa, who says he would support U.S. funding of abortion and contraception to ‘fight climate change’. The fewer people, the better, in the not-so sympathetic socialist view of Mr. Sanders. There is no mention that he, a late septuagenarian who has largely lived out his three score and ten, is ready for the chopping block, or, for that matter, Dr. Soderlund’s wok.

Meanwhile, back in the land of just simple insidious greed, there is much evidence that the prophet-moppet Greta Thurnberg, fresh off her transatlantic voyage on a billionaire’s sailing yacht, is a shill – how witting is unclear – for profit-driven ‘clean-energy’ companies, ready to cash in on all the government’s legislative enforcement for said green technologies. This reminds me of the rather convenient truth that all the while Al Gore was propounding the end-of-the-world message with his ‘Inconvenient Truth’, he was investing millions in green technologies – windfarms and the rest – and was soon rolling in the green stuff. Look up his ‘estate’, and his own Brontosaurus-sized emissions.

With the likes of Mr. Gore getting a bit long of tooth and wide of girth, the snake-oil salesmen seem to need fresh, innocent faces to sell their dubious wares. And, lo and behold, along comes Pippi Longstocking redivivus, ponytails and all, ready to lecture the ‘truth’ to her benighted adult lessers.

Is this the company the Holy Father would like to seen keeping, in his repeated advocacy of global warming, climate change, even now his own version of apocalyptic ‘climate emergencies’?

What, pray tell, is the end point of all this? An elite feasting and carousing in vast, luxurious gated compounds, with the rest of us hoi polloi eking out our bland, paelolithic days – after all, any technology has some sort of carbon footprint – existing as we might on herbs and roots out there in the tundra? Or, better yet, not existing at all?

I will repeat – like Cato the Elder obsessed with Carthage, itself an anti-life, Godless city, which murdered its own children – the whole anthropogenic climate change thing is so wrapped up with the ‘evil’ of human existence, at least any sort of full human flourishing, that, even philosophically and theologically prescinding from its scientific dubiousness, I cannot buy it. God made the Earth, and all the creatures thereupon, indeed the entire cosmos, for Man, and not Man for the Earth. And the purpose of our pilgrimage on this Earth – whose climate will fluctuate until it is wrapped up like a mantle in God’s good time – is to go to heaven, where and when only we will truly begin to live.

Beware anyone selling you a different message.

Carney’s Amoral Majority

After five defections – euphemistically described as ‘crossing the floor’ – and three by-elections, Mark Carney and his Liberals how have their coveted majority. One wonders what bowls of pottage were offered in back-room deals. In the archaic monarchical system that is the Dominion of Canada, this majority allows the newly-minted Prime Minister to rule[…]Continue reading→

Saint Kateri , Canada’s Protectress

This was the title given to Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, by Pope Benedict XVI, when he canonized her on October 28th, 2012, along with six others, in Saint Peter’ Square (she had been beatified by Pope John Paul II back in 1980). With Saint Joseph as our protector, along with the Canadian martyrs, we seem to[…]Continue reading→

A Closed, Unsustainable, Descending Loop

As a follow-up to my thoughts on Payette’s payout, here be a stark image of where are here in Canada. As the graph shows in, well, graphic terms, since 2025, the public sector has contributed to 95.5% of economic growth. The private sector – which funds the public sector, or is supposed to – has[…]Continue reading→

A Tale of Two Benedicts

A grace-filled Holy Week to all our readers! As we await and prepare for the Resurrection about to dawn upon us, we might keep in mind two Benedicts: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, requiescat in pace, elected on this day in 2005; and today’s commemoration of the mystic pilgrim, Benedict Joseph Labre, who died on this[…]Continue reading→

My Name is Bernadette

April 16th is a propitious day, for besides the anniversary of Father de Valk’s death, who founded Catholic Insight in its print form decades ago, and the commemoration of the ‘two Benedicts’, mentioned in accompanying posts, today we also recall Saint Bernadette Soubirous, the young visionary to whom the Virgin Mary appeared numerous times at[…]Continue reading→

Presidential Pardon of Weronika Krawczyk

As a good news, follow-up to our story from Poland, of the persecution of Weronika Krawczyk for her pro-life views, we heard that she has been granted a presidential pardon. One might still wonder why one needs a presidential pardon for simply holding the long-held belief that the child within the womb is a child,[…]Continue reading→

Saint Lydwina of Schiedam and Suffering Joyfully

Saint Lydwina of Schiedam (1380 – 1433) was one of the countless and glorious ‘victim souls’ in the history of the Church, those whose lives are filled with suffering, often of an unimaginable intensity, but who suffer joyfully. She was a fifteen-year old Dutch girl, out skating one day, when she fell and broke one[…]Continue reading→

The Glorious Martyrdoms of Martin and Maximus

As we enter into Eastertide, we recall on this 13th of April Pope Saint Martin I (+655), one of the noblest, if most tragic, of the successors of Saint Peter. Born in Umbria, Italy, he was of noble lineage, with great intelligence combined with charity and love of the poor and the Church. While still[…]Continue reading→

Pope Leo and a Rosary for Peace

Pope Leo XIV has asked Catholics across the world to join him in a Rosary for peace today, at 18:00 Rome time (6 pm), which would be noon from where I write (EST). If you are able, whether at that time or another, and in whatever way you pray, to join in intercession with the[…]Continue reading→

Payette’s Payout

I was glancing through some headlines, and noticed a mention of Julie Payette – engineer and astronaut and sometime the Queen’s representative in Canada – which brought back vague memories. She was appointed Governor-General by Justin Trudeau in 2017. Ms. Payette resigned in 2021, amidst claims that she created a ‘toxic work environment’, with allegations[…]Continue reading→