Despite the fact that poll numbers are tanking so badly for Hillary Clinton that there is a new movement to draft Joe Biden, it turns out she has some competition for biggest drop in favorability!
New numbers from Gallop for Pope Francis show a significant drop in support for the pontiff. The favorability rating is now at 59%, down from 76% in early 2014.
…The drop in the pope’s favorable rating is driven by a decline among Catholics and political conservatives, two groups that have been ardent supporters of the modern papacy. Seventy-one percent of Catholics say they have a favorable image of Francis, down from 89% last year.
Pope Francis’ drop in favorability is even starker among Americans who identify as conservative — 45% of whom view him favorably, down sharply from 72% last year. This decline may be attributable to the pope’s denouncing of “the idolatry of money” and linking climate change partially to human activity, along with his passionate focus on income inequality — all issues that are at odds with many conservatives’ beliefs.
Why the plunge? As an independent conservative who is also Catholic, I must admit I am none too thrilled at the attacks on capitalism as a “structurally perverse” global economic system. I assert that these remarks that are too political and secular for a man who should be focused on more spiritual matters.
I am also deeply concerned about the type of counsel that the Pope has chosen.
Pope Francis’ closest adviser castigated conservative climate change skeptics in the United States Tuesday, blaming capitalism for their views.
Speaking with journalists, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga criticized certain “movements” in the United States that have preemptively come out in opposition to Francis’s planned encyclical on climate change.
“The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits,” Rodríguez said, according to the Boston Globe’s Crux blog.
Rodríguez isn’t the only source of questionable guidance either. Dr. Martin Fricke, a nuclear physicist who supports efforts to challenge the bad science behind “climate change” activism, did some digging on the people Pope Francis relied on to develop the environmental encyclical, Laudato Si.
Fricke’s findings are chilling.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Pontifical Academy of Science was the lead climate scientist Pope Francis consulted. Schellnhuber was present on the panel that presented the encyclical to the world’s press.
While I hadn’t seen his name before, I’m a nuclear physicist not a climate scientist, so I asked two of the most widely recognized top climate scientists in the world about him. I haven’t sought permission to forward their opinions elsewhere, so I must refrain from impressing you with their names. I’ll call them Expert 1 Expert 2.
Expert 1: “Schellnhuber is a well-known global warming fanatic, a sort of mirror image of our own Jim Hansen. He runs the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. I don’t think he knows very much climate science but he knows how to scare people with lurid “impacts.” I am sending a copy of this note to [Substitution: “Expert 2”] who can tell you much more if he has time.”
Expert 2: “Schellnhuber is…a fanatical Malthusian who believes the carrying capacity of the earth is 1 billion people… He apparently boasted that he was responsible for preventing anyone questioning warming alarms from getting access to the pope. He is (or at least was) on the board of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia [home of the well known email scandal that was instrumental in discrediting the IPCC].”
While I am not going to stop being Catholic over these developments, I must admit that donating to the Catholic Church is going to be more difficult. What Pope Francis and his cronies fail to realize is that the core of capitalism is not profit, but choice. Furthermore, choices must be made with real data and information, not manipulated facts supporting an agenda.
Currently, I have decided to adopt a page from progressives for handing contributions to my church: Go local. My donations will be used for parish support only, and none will be directed to papal efforts at promoting bad science and even worse economics.
Based on his efforts to treat the entire globe as a Latin American socialist nation, the pontiff has been christened by some as the “Red Pope”. If this trend continues, the favorability numbers will continue to blacken.