Are you fasting from plastic bags and incandescent lightbulbs for Lent?

Frankly, I never ate them in the first place.

But really, an article published by Catholic News Service (and printed in the Arlington Catholic Herald to their shame) actually has the gall to suggest that Lent isn't "just about giving up chocolate or ice cream for 40 days." (Hear the superior tone?) No, what it's really about, according to the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change (CCCC) is sacrificing for the environment. Trees are people too, after all. In fact the Executive Director of CCCC, Dan Misleh, is sending out "Catholic climate ambassadors" this spring to urge folks to use cloth shopping bags instead of paper, replace incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent bulbs, give up disposable paper products, and use refillable coffee mugs. Yes indeed, this is what Lent is really all about; the way to Christian holiness is recycling and reducing your carbon footprint.

I visited the CCCC website, another misguided project of the USCCB launched in 2006. It begins with the unreserved acceptance of manmade global warming propaganda (now referred to as climate change). In a position paper describing CCCC I found this interesting and laughable statement:

Because we are not experts on climate change and its consequences, we rely on a scientific consensus (best represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change) to guide our activities. Read the document here...

Perhaps CCCC hasn't heard about all the scandals associated with the IPCC including manipulating data, maligning scientists whose research conflicts with their desired results and denying them access to peer reviewed journals, lying about glacier melt. Oh, and then there are the 1000s of emails that showed the deliberate fraud by this group promoting what meteorologist and founder of the weather channel, John Coleman, calls "the greatest scam in history." Yup, these are the "scientists" whose results CCCC relies on. Not particularly convincing I'd say.

What made me especially angry about the bishops' site was the manipulative video using a child's voice to decry the heavy carbon footprint of the rich countries that are stepping on the poor all over the world. You can almost envision yourself squashing the poor like bugs every time you turn on the hot water, drive your car, heat your home, etc. You are to blame for all those sad faces because of your heavy and deep carbon footprint. Just imagine how guilty the parents of large families should feel!

The video speaks an outright lie when it quotes Cardinal Martino saying:

There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming over the last fifty years is attributed to human activities.

Now I'm not accusing the Cardinal of lying. No doubt he is buying the fraudulent data of the IPCC.  And considering that he spent about 20 years as papal nuncio at the U.N., he may have a hard time distinguishing between liars and truth tellers; but the fact is there is not only no "new and stronger evidence" for man-made global warming, there is evidence we are moving into a period of cooling and that fluctuations are a normal part of climate measured over time. The "scientists" at the IPCC haven't come up with a good explanation for the Medieval warming period which can hardly be attributed to the use of fossil fuels, so they conveniently ignore it along with any other facts that dispute their bogus claims.

Having said all this, Catholics ought to live a simpler lifestyle where we voluntarily use less so we can contribute more to the poor. Underline that world "voluntarily." The Dives and Lazarus story says it all. We have a moral obligation to care about the poor and share what we have. That's what charity is all about and we have a special obligation during Lent. However, charity, to be charity, must ALWAYS be voluntary. Someone who steals from Peter to give to Paul is not charitable; he's a thief.

And there are plenty of those thieves listed on CCCCs website. When you read their position paper linked above, note their Catholic partners on the left. Many of them are funded big-time by "government" money especially Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Catholic Charities (CC). (I.e., The only money the government has is what it takes from taxpayers and that is supposed to be used for limited and specific purposes.) In fact both CRS and CC are hardly recognizable as Catholic groups because they water down their Catholic identity to protect the government bucks stolen from the taxpayer. So CRS and CC are part of the government conspiracy to forcibly redistribute income which is NOT CHARITY. It's also not very efficient since massive amounts of money go to the bureaucracy and only small amounts trickle down to the poor. And sometimes what actually gets to the poor isn't food and medicine; it's birth control pills, condoms, and suction machines.

Let's look at a few other of CCCC's partners. The Catholic Hospital Association is notorious particularly in view of the betrayal on Obamacare by Sr. Carol Keehan who makes nearly $900,000 in annual salary and can afford a much heavier footprint than most of us. Then there are the dissident nuns of the Leadership Conference of Catholic Women (LCCW) who never met a liberal issue (including abortion) that their members couldn't support. The Franciscan Action Network has endorsed the union thugs in Wisconsin. The Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development is the USCCB office that runs the tainted Catholic Campaign for Human Development and employs staff with links to pro-abortion democrats. It just goes on and on and on. This is the social justice money machine.

I hope you are as angry as I am about the video below. What really hurts the poor is corrupt governments, biofuels which turn food crops into ethanol (promoted big-time by Al Gore and his environmental minions until it became clear it was causing massive rises in food prices), foreign aid linked to murdering and sterilizing the poor, and other complicated issues. The nonsense about global warming and fossil fuels killing the poor is nothing but propaganda. And just think, if you're a Catholic you paid for this idiotic video, one more reason to boycott the bishops' collections.

Instead of putting money in that rice bowl this Lent for the very problematic CRS, give to a charity that really serves the poor and doesn't take government money to do it. Medical Missionaries is one of my favorites and we'll be filling our alms jar this Lent for them. And if you feel guilty after watching the video, go visit a nursing home. Remember what Mother Teresa said, "The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty." Many lonely and forgotten people are waiting to hear your footsteps in the hall even if you arrived in a gas-guzzling SUV.