NEWTON'S OPTIC: Newton Emerson reports on a most holy book launch of cardinal importance to Catholic Ireland.
Scandals in the Catholic Church "are the last thing you should be worried about", claims Cardinal Cahal Weakly in his new book Mind Your Earth!, out now priced £14.99.
"We are facing impending environmental catastrophe on a cosmic scale," the former primate of all Ireland, except the Protestant parts, told reporters yesterday.
"We could be hit by an asteroid or dissolved by acid rain or bombarded by deadly gamma rays from a collapsing supernova in the Andromeda galaxy and what good would an RTÉ Prime Time documentary do us then, eh?"
Speaking at the launch of his book in Dublin, the cardinal also assured guests that the church is aware of the dangers posed by climate change. "We are aware that the changing climate poses a danger to the church," he said. "That's why I'd like to talk about the environment, instead. As some of you may know the world is getting warmer due to gas from greenhouses and exhaustion from driving which causes freak weather phenomena such as flood tribunals, storms of protest and golf ball-sized hail Marys. This is a terrible business altogether."
To protect the environment Cardinal Weakly urged people to follow the example of the Catholic Church, which is tackling issues like pollution, overpopulation, desertification and waste with policies like nuns on bicycles, celibacy and holy water conservation.
He also warned that "finite resources can not last indefinitely", causing panic on the London commodities and futures exchange, where many traders had assumed that the earth's crust extended downwards forever.
In his book the cardinal blames the sin of greed for many of the more immediate threats facing humankind. "It should put us to shame that Western society suffers problems of superfluity, like obesity and alcohol abuse; while a major part of the world's population suffers from malnutrition, disease, lack of educational opportunity - all of them linked to poverty," he writes.
"Young people should be encouraged to spend time in underdeveloped countries so that they can appreciate the value of the food and water they will be consuming while they are there."
These comments have been strongly criticised by Mona Lott of the Dundalk Poverty Network Forum. "Obesity and alcohol abuse in the West are also problems of poverty, as anyone who deals with priests should know," she said. "Poverty is relative, although that relativity doesn't apply to people in the developing world who are relatively poor compared to poor people in the Western world, because over large distances the concept of poverty experiences relativistic distortions, just like gamma rays from the Andromeda galaxy."
However, it is the cardinal's criticism of financial greed that has caused the most advance publicity. "One of the great scandals in modern Ireland is the systematic practice of tax evasion by some of our wealthiest citizens," he said yesterday. "In 1967 Pope Paul VI asked people to accept 'necessary taxes on their luxuries and wasteful expenditures' and declared it unacceptable for wealthy citizens to transfer a considerable part of their wealth abroad 'purely for their own advantage without care for the manifest wrong they inflict on their own country by doing this'."
"These words have extraordinary relevance to modern Ireland," explained Cardinal Weakly, "as, unlike the Pope, nobody in Ireland has been able to register their business premises with the United Nations as a country then tax themselves. Except Charlie Haughey."
"To add to the shame," he added, "banks and financial institutions have been complicit in facilitating this scandalous practice, unlike the Vatican Bank which has no shame about its scandalous practices whatsoever." In his book Cardinal Weakly also dismisses the claim that advances in scientific learning will necessarily lead to the decline and eventual disappearance of religion.
"If we look at the young people of Ireland today," he writes, "we can see that scientific learning is actually in decline yet religion is disappearing anyway. So clearly there is no connection there at all."
In his concluding remarks Cardinal Weakly quoted Genesis and U2 to argue that humankind and, to a much lesser extent, womankind, have a duty of care towards the environment and all living creatures. "Human beings have a biblical mandate to act as the shepherd of creation," he said. "Others, including the media, must respect our mandate. We are stewards, not masters, of the universe. Only God and He-Man are masters of the universe."
Mind Your Earth! has been printed on high-quality bleached paper and delivered by diesel van to all good bookshops.
Newton Emerson is editor of the satirical website portadownnews.com