You have to love (he wrote sarcastically) the hypocrisy of liberals who suddenly praise Pope Francis for his views on capitalism and the environment.

Good luck finding those same liberals on the subjects of abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage, all of which the Roman Catholic Church firmly opposes.

James Taranto (who is not Catholic) writes:

“They told me if I voted Republican, America would wind up taking scientific dictation from religious leaders,” observes Glenn Reynolds, setting up his best-known punch line: “And they were right!”

Heh. Indeed. What prompts that jape is a screenshot of the New York Times science section, which, according to the InstaPundit, “was all about the Pope.” Actually three of the four headlines were definitely about him: “Pope Francis Aligns Himself With Mainstream Science on Climate,” “Pope Francis, in Sweeping Encyclical, Calls for Swift Action on Climate Change” and “On Planet in Distress, a Papal Call to Action.” The fourth was something about ancient stars—though come to think of it, Francis is 78.

Most of the gas being emitted in reaction to the pope’s recent encyclical, “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home,” is not nearly this entertaining. The Times has an editorial, “The Pope and Climate Change”; Salon has a histrionically partisan piece by Bob Cesca, “How Pope Francis Just Destroyed the GOP’s Religious Con Artists.” It all seems very phoned-in.

Yet predictable as it is, it’s also a bit peculiar. When did the secular left develop such respect for religious authority? And it’s not just the pope. The Times commissioned a joint op-ed by the mononymous Bartholmew and Justin Welby, the leaders, respectively, of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion. They echo the pope’s call for “action” on “climate change.” The Washington Post’s Janell Ross, meanwhile, touts evangelical Protestant global warm-mongers:

The National Association of Evangelicals, which describes itself as an organization representing more than 455,000 local congregations, began pushing for climate change-conscious policies during George W. Bush’s time in office. And the New York Times reported that The Christian Coalition, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, fought unsuccessfully for a climate change bill in Congress in both 2009 and 2010.

In 2008, 45 members of the Southern Baptist Convention, a network of more than 50,000 churches and missions, signed a letter describing their previous stance on environmental matters as, “too timid.” And, that same year the entire convention approved a resolution declaring “it is prudent to address global climate change.”

Some of the pope’s purported proponents are in fact openly contemptuous of religion and are merely using him to accuse their political opposites of hypocrisy. Here’s Cesca from that Salon piece:

If it’s okay for [Jeb] Bush, [Rick] Santorum and [Marco] Rubio to simply waive the Church’s teachings on the climate crisis, why is it impossible for them to do the same when it comes to their religion-based positions on abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage?

Sure, it wouldn’t be the first time Republicans have failed the sniff test when it comes to cherry-picking the Bible and conveniently ignoring passages that don’t conform to their ideology. (Almost everything Jesus said, for example.) But given the magnitude of what the Pope has delivereed [sic] to the world this week, given the stupendous magnitude of the crisis, and given the vocal anti-climate orthodoxy of the Catholic Republican candidates, the question has to be asked.

Why is it okay for persons of faith to ignore the crap they don’t like, while outright legislating the crap they do like?

Of course one could just as easily turn that scatological, rhetorical tu quoque against Catholic Democrats like Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo and Nancy Pelosi. And actually, there is an answer to Cesca’s question, put forth by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue:

Catholics are expected to give their assent to papal teachings, but it is not true that all pronouncements are morally equal. In 2004, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) was explicit about this: “Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.”

It goes without saying that climate change is not on the same moral plane with the intentional killing of innocent human beings.

It is fair to surmise that many of those applauding the encyclical would sit on their hands for significant portions of it. In a Wall Street Journal column, Father Robert Sirico notes that the encyclical “voices moral statements dismissing popular, ill-conceived positions”:

The repeated lie that overpopulation is harming the planet—expressed by even some of the advisers for the Vatican—is soundly rejected. It is bewildering that the people who have been most vigorous in developing the policies proposed in the encyclical are those who also vigorously support population control and abortion as solutions to the environmental problem.

National Journal quotes the encyclical: “Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?”

Writing for the American Spectator, Gene Koprowski and S.T. Karnick observe that “the pope says no to carbon credits and carbon tax credit trading,” financial schemes that have been likened to the selling of indulgences, a corruption of the medieval church. “Al Gore was probably on the phone with his portfolio manager in Dubai at 1 a.m. Eastern time … dumping some of his vast green equity holdings,” they quip.

So the left isn’t really bowing to papal authority. What they’re doing is the opposite—praising the pope for bowing to the secular “authority” of science.

But science has no holy father. Science is a method, not a set of doctrines; and scientific pronouncements are authoritative only when they are considerably better understood than “climate science” is today—and even then they are always subject to revision as new information comes to light. When a global warmist says “the science is settled,” he is making a political statement, not a scientific one.

The left’s embrace of the pope is entirely a matter of political expediency. Among other things, they seek, as another Washington Post headline puts it, to put “2016 GOP Hopefuls on the Defensive.” Karen Tumulty reports:

Catholic politicians face a balancing act, given the popularity of a pope who had an approval rating of 86 percent among U.S. Catholics and 64 percent among Americans overall in a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a Catholic convert campaigning in Iowa, was asked Wednesday about the papal document.

“I respect the pope. I think he’s an incredible leader, but I think it’s better to solve this problem in the political realm,” Bush said. “I’m going to read what he says, of course. I’m a Catholic and try to follow the teachings of the church.”

Later, Bush added: “I don’t go to Mass for economic policy or for things in politics.”

Sen. John F. Kennedy said much the same thing in 1960: “I believe in an America where … no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act. … I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source.”

The New York Times evidently disagrees. From today’s editorial:

“Laudato Si” is the first papal encyclical devoted solely to environmental issues—and also, Pope Francis clearly hopes, the beginning of the broad moral awakening necessary to persuade not just one billion Catholic faithful, but humanity at large, of our collective responsibility to pass along a clean and safe planet to future generations. In other words, to do the things that mere facts have not inspired us to do.

The paper took the opposite position in a May 2012 editorial on a different subject:

Under the Constitution, churches and other religious organizations have total freedom to preach that contraception is sinful and rail against [President] Obama for making it more readily available. But the First Amendment is not a license for religious entities to impose their dogma on society through the law. The vast majority of Americans do not agree with the Roman Catholic Church’s anti-contraception stance, including most American Catholic women.

The Times further defended the legitimacy of forcing devout employers to act against their faith by providing contraceptive and abortifacient drugs and devices via workers’ medical benefits.

An obvious question arises: If many individual Catholics feel free to reject their church’s teachings on contraception and even abortion, why should anyone expect them—never mind “humanity at large”—to fall into line with global warmism on the pope’s say-so?

I was raised Catholic, but now am not, so I have the right to agree or disagree with the pope, who has no authority over me. I am an Episcopalian, which is part of the Anglican Communion, which, if it agrees with the global warming hysterics, is wrong. I don’t answer to them either; the determinant of whether I go upward or downward at the end is not on this earth.

On a more secular note, Ronald Bailey observes:

The encyclical more or less accurately recapitulates the findings of mainstream climate science with regard to the effects of human activity on the climate. Basically, loading up the atmosphere with greenhouse gases produced largely from burning fossil fuels has boosted the average temperature of the globe over the past half century or so. Fine, as far as that goes.

The Pontiff then moves on to use the problem of climate change as an example of the deep spiritual and ethical problems allegedly stemming from the whole enterprise of modernity. Climate change is not a technological and economic problem involving trade-offs, it is a moral issue. Whenever someone, even as nice a man Pope Francis is, declares something a moral issue, what they are saying to people who disagree with them is: Shut up! How dare you talk of trade-offs!

With due respect, the Pope apparently misunderstands how science and the free enterprise system works. Oh, he praises the miracles of medicine, electricity, agricultural productivity, automobiles, airplanes, biotechnology, computers. From the encyclical:

We are the beneficiaries of two centuries of enormous waves of change: steam engines, railways, the telegraph, electricity, automobiles, aeroplanes, chemical industries, modern medicine, information technology and, more recently, the digital revolution, robotics, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. It is right to rejoice in these advances and to be excited by the immense possibilities which they continue to open up before us, for “science and technology are wonderful products of a God-given human creativity”. The modification of nature for useful purposes has distinguished the human family from the beginning; technology itself “expresses the inner tension that impels man gradually to overcome material limitations”. Technology has remedied countless evils which used to harm and limit human beings. How can we not feel gratitude and appreciation for this progress, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering and communications?

Indeed, who cannot feel such gratitude? But the Pontiff apparently has no clue as to how the progress he celebrates and which lifted billions from humanity’s natural state of abject poverty came about. …

The earth is not unlimited, but human ingenuity is. Climate change (and other environmental problems) are not moral issues that require sacrifice and abnegation; they will be solved by continued technological progress and economic growth. Anything that slows down that process will slow down the cleaning up and restoration of the natural world.