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(LifeSiteNews) — The Sixth forum of the “Laudato Si’ Communities” was held in Verona, Italy, earlier this month. This is a series of meetings devoted to propagating Pope Francis’ views on what is called “the climate emergency.”

This latest affair was called “Doubling the Commitment.” This was a reference to Francis’ new exhortation, Laudate Deum, in which he warns us that the end is near, both for “our suffering planet” and, by extension, for us.

He struck the same note in his opening video message to the Verona meeting, warning that it’s “a very difficult time” and that “within 30 years the world will be unlivable.”

The “apocalypse now” message is by now drearily familiar, but I was still surprised by the messianic zeal with which it is being proposed by leaders within the Catholic Church.

Take Bishop Domenico Pompili, who hosted the event. He opened the forum by emphasizing that simply transitioning to policies that protect the planet is not enough. What is needed, he said, is an ecological “conversion,” a striving to create a planetary “utopia.”

I am merely a poor convert, but Pompili makes protecting the environment sound like a spiritual quest. And the only spiritual quest I want to be on is one that leads not to some earthly utopia, but home to Heaven.

Why do the same Church leaders who shy away from boldly proclaiming the Catholic faith suddenly transform into street preachers when evangelizing for environmentalism?

But if I was surprised by Pompili’s fervor in promoting environmentalism, I was actually shocked that one of the leaders of the Club of Rome, its vice president Carlos Alvarez Pereira, would be invited to address a Vatican-sponsored conference.

You see, the Club of Rome is a Masonic lodge founded in 1968 on David Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy. Like the World Economic Forum, but preceding it by several decades, it’s a collection of rich Western “elite” mixed in with heads of state, UN bureaucrats, and business leaders.

Unlike the WEF, however, it is an explicitly Masonic organization. As a USCCB committee concluded in 1985, “the principles and basic rituals of Masonry embody a naturalistic religion active participation in which is incompatible with Christian faith and practice.” Two years earlier, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and with the personal approval of Pope St. John Paul II, had declared that “faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion… [Masonic] principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden.”

Moreover, the Club of Rome has from its founding been one of the chief promoters of both the Malthusian myth of overpopulation and radical population control programs. To achieve its aims, it has not hesitated to sow fear among the population by fabricating data. That is to say, lying.

The Club of Rome’s most famous foray into fiction came in 1972, when it released a study called The Limits to Growth. Funded by the Club and written by a group of MIT-based systems engineers, the study predicted that the world would come to an end by about 2070 if population growth were allowed to continue.[1]  The authors hyperventilated that there was “no other avenue to survival” than radical reduction in the planet’s human population. “Population control” was “the only feasible solution” to mankind’s dilemma.[2]

The Club of Rome seized upon the study to assert that humanity was breeding itselves off the planet and, further, that drastic steps must be taken to stem this human tide.  A public relations firm was hired, a press conference was organized, and the book was released with great fanfare. Scary stories sell, and this one sold a frightening four million copies, injecting the book indelibly into the world’s consciousness.

Although most people had no way of knowing it, what they thought was cutting-edge systems analysis was little more than a scientific hoax. The data were incomplete and sometimes inaccurate, the methodology was flawed, and The Limits to Growth assumption of an immediate end to scientific and technical progress was flat-out wrong.

To demonstrate just how wrongheaded the study was, other scientists backed up the computer model to 1870. They then used the same rules laid out in Limits to predict developments over the following century (1870-1970), using only 1870 science and technology. The computer predicted that the world would come to an end before 1970, in part because of society’s inability to cope with the massive amount of horse manure that was being generated.

I regard this as an apt commentary on the whole enterprise.[3]

My late friend, economist Julian Simon agreed, noting that “The Limits to Growth has been blasted as foolishness or fraud by almost every economist who has read it closely or reviewed it in print.” (italics added)[4]

In the end, Limits turned out to be both foolish and fraudulent. Two years after the publication of the second volume of the study the Club of Rome unexpectedly “reversed its position” and “came out for more growth.”[5]

The mainstream media, which had not only bought into The Limits to Growth, but heavily promoted it among its readers, was taken aback. When reporters asked the Club of Rome’s founder, Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei, the reason for the sudden about-face, he was remarkably candid:

Limits was intended to jolt people from the comfortable idea that present growth trends could continue indefinitely. That done, he says, the Club could then seek ways to close the widening gap between rich and poor nations—inequities that, if they continue, could all too easily lead to famine, pollution and war. The Club’s startling shift, Peccei says, is thus not so much a turnabout as part of an evolving strategy.”[6]

Translation:  The study was rigged in order to dupe people into demanding population control, and to trick the U.S. Congress and other legislative bodies into funding it.  And they did.

During his presentation at the Laudato Si’ forum, Masonic leader Alvarez Pereira predictably called for the “Great Reset”:  “Nothing has changed in recent years, while we need to quickly change the patterns, the abilities of everyone and not only of an elite that sees the problems, sees the solutions and imposes them on people.”

His latest article for the World Economic Forum utilizes the same fear-mongering technique in claiming our current development model is unsustainable.  And in a book he co-authored last year called Limits and Beyond: 50 years on from The Limits to Growth, he said that achieving sustainable economic development required a further drop in birth rates.

So whose idea was it to invite a leader of a Masonic group known for lying about overpopulation and promoting radical population control policies that violate human rights to a Vatican-sponsored conference?

As far as I know, the first commandment given to our first parents has never been rescinded.  We are called, as Catholics, to be fruitful and multiply.  To fill not only the earth but those empty mansions in Heaven that Our Lord spoke of.

It is bad enough that the Pope has in the past criticized the mothers of large families.

It is far worse that a meeting organized by the Vatican—a meeting that the Pope himself addressed—should have as one of its speakers a member of a secret society dedicated to the destruction of the Catholic Church, and the goading of humanity into barrenness and depopulation.

Masonic leader Alvarez Pereira is one of the high priests of an anti-human, anti-Christian creed.

What, the hell.

Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia:  Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order and many other books.

[1] D. H. Meadows et al, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. (Universe Books, New York: 1972)

[2] Meadows et al. 1974: 196; “The Only Feasible Solution” is the title of Chapter 9 of the second volume of the report, Mankind at the Turning Point by Mesarovic, Mihajlo, and Eduard Pestel. Mankind at the Turning Point: The Second Report to the Club of Rome (New York, E.P. Dutton: 1974).

[3] See Robert Sassone, Handbook on Population, Fifth Edition (Stafford: Virginia, merican Life League, 1994), p. 6.

[4] Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 286. See, inter alia, Cole, H.S.D., Christopher Freeman, Marie Jahoda, and K.L.R. Pavitt, eds., 1973. Models of Doom: A Critique of The Limits to Growth, (New York: Universe, 1973).

[5] Time magazine, 26 April 1976, 56; New York Times, 14 April 1976.

[6] Time magazine, 26 April 1976.

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