by PAUL COLLITS – JUST imagine if the Pope came to Lismore. That would be a story.
Well, this week we were graced (pun intended) with a visit from the spiritual leader of the Anglican communion.
He is not, technically, the head of the Church of England. That privilege, since the time of the divorced, philandering Henry VIII, rests with the British monarch. Some things never change.
- If only he had resisted the opportunity to make the flood about his preferred ideology.
- Archbishop Welby is widely known to be a friend of the woke class.
- His message would have been endorsed by that other card-carrying member of the globalist climate cartel, Pope Francis.
So, the Archbishop came to Lismore.
RAVAGED
His intention was to include flood ravaged Lismore in his Australian itinerary. Ostensibly, the visit was to provide comfort to a city wracked by natural disaster.
ArchbishopJustin Welby is nearing the end of a two-week visit to Australia that has included Perth, Melbourne and the Torres Strait Islands.
He said he particularly wanted to visit the Northern Rivers after hearing about the devastation of the floods.
Parts of England have had their own experiences with catastrophic flooding in recent years.
Archbishop Welby said he wanted to see what his church could learn from its Australian counterparts about supporting communities through a disaster.
He said he also wanted to show solidarity.
So far, so good. The spirit of the good Samaritan lives on.
Inevitably, the Bill Gates funded Guardian newspaper portrayed the visit as a discovery of the ravages of climate change.
Justin Welby says churches should encourage direct action on climate change as he sees boarded-up shops and unliveable houses in far-flung parish reeling from disaster.
“It brings it home”.
FALLACY
It brings it home?
It does nothing of the sort, of course. It seems tedious to have to point out the “cause and effect” fallacy reflexively repeated here.
Or the circular reasoning. We say that global warming leads to more floods. Lismore had a bad flood. Therefore, global warming caused the Lismore flood.
Stick to religion, Your Grace. Oh, wait a minute. Given the over-the-cliff crashing of faith in your Church, you might not actually want to talk about that. Maybe the two are connected?
The Archbishop continued:
He said the visit would have a “very significant effect” on his thinking about climate change — a topic he has long been passionate about.
He recounted the Archbishop of Polynesia once telling him, “For you guys in the west, this is a problem for the 2030s and the 2040s. For us, it’s life and death today”.
“You come here, and you realise it’s not just Fiji. It’s here where it’s life and death today,” Archbishop Welby said.
“So, it just sharpens your mind and your sense of priority.”
It’s not just Fiji. Oh dear. Crisis in Fiji. Lismore floods. Climate emergency!
As the fictional British Prime Minister Jim Hacker noted (in The Bishop’s Gambit), it is astonishing how politicians now want to talk morals and prelates want to talk politics. They might also try logic. Evidence. Science.
Perhaps a perceptive reporter on the scene might have tested Welby’s knowledge of local climate matters with a question about Tim Flannery’s infamous prediction that, as a result of global warming, “the rivers and dams would never fill again”.
DAM
No point building dams. Maybe if Lismore had had a dam…
Perhaps if the Archbishop of Canterbury had confined himself to expressing sympathy and grief for the many victims of the flood, exacerbated by unforgivable failures of NSW governance, it might have had more impact on the ground. Something beyond a photo opportunity.
If only he had resisted the opportunity to make the flood about his preferred ideology.
The Archbishop did get close to the real issues:
He said he had been shocked and disappointed by how many residents had struggled to find the assistance they needed to recover from the floods.
He called for organisations and all tiers of government to band together for a grassroots-led recovery.
Indeed.
The image of Lismore’s St Carthage’s Cathedral inundated by the February 2022 flood will live long in our memory.
The Cathedral had never fallen prey to Lismore’s infamous floods. Legend has it that the local Aborigines had warned the then Catholic prelates not to build the cathedral on the site ordained, “because it floods”.
It took a long time for the local Aborigines’ local knowledge to be vindicated.
But back to climate change.
Archbishop Welby is widely known to be a friend of the woke class. He has form, across the range of progressive issues. “The religious wing of Twitter”, according to one description of his tenure.
His take on the flood was, therefore, only to be expected.
How things have changed.
The most famous Archbishop of Canterbury, back in the day when the Catholic Church ran ecclesial matters in Britain, was murdered by the henchmen of Henry II.
The story was made famous in modern times by TS Eliot in his Murder in the Cathedral.
That was St Thomas Beckett, who, as far as we know, was not the least concerned about climate change. Both the medieval warm period and the little ice age lay well ahead, into the British future.
LAMENTING
Henry II spent the rest of his life lamenting the outcome of his troops’ endeavours. As well he might.
The visit of Welby to Lismore reminds us of how far the Church of Jesus Christ has fallen.
The message of the visit would, no doubt, have been endorsed by that other card-carrying member of the globalist climate cartel, Pope Francis.
A hypothetical visit to the scene of the floods from the Pontiff would, no doubt, have elicited similar headlines. What about Noah, and God’s vengeance? Nothing to see there. It’s all about CO2.PC
The Pope aside, Wellby’s visit to geoengineered flood victims in Lismore would definitely have been endorsed by King Charles III, Head of the Church of England.
Charles first broadcast aspirations as king (and chief royal for the WEF’s Great Reset) subtlety referenced bringing “the margins to the centre”. These were paired with a clip from US Climate tsar John Kerry, hoping “King Charles can assert the moral authority to guide the nation through this Climate crisis”.
Likewise Prime Minister Albanese, in London for the Queen’s funeral, was similarly comfortable that the new king had his foot on the Climate accelerator pedal.
Well, already the Climate chickens are coming home to roost!
As planned, a panicked UK, like the rest of deindustrialised, energy depleted Europe, now faces the winter of its discontent.
Seems that, in order to “stay safe”, lucked-out Lismore will be left to languish while humanity in the north is condemned to freeze.
But what are the odds on a curtailed Coronation by Candlelight for Charles and Queen Consort Camilla?
On Welby’s watch, Christian baptism has dropped to just 5% of births in England and the most popular names of babies are seasonally adjusted to exclude Mohammed. From Welby’s preaching you would never know that the Christian message is one of hope and the triumph of eternal life through belief in Christ over death. By any standard, Christianity is a brilliant construct, so what do our progressive friends do? They persistently tear it down and offer their own non-solutions to the human condition. The result? A birthrate below replacement, an epidemic of mental health problems amongst youth, whose depression is understandable, the destruction of the traditional family and an increase in loneliness as society implodes. Of course, if you are a Jesus-themed Marxist like Welby, these developments are all part of social development. And he wonders why the pews are empty.
Welby is just another loud-mouthed limp-wristed hand-wringer in a dog collar, legions of whom infest the ranks of the mainstream so-called “churches”. The reason that he doesn’t preach Christ crucified for our sins and raised to life for the justification of those who believe is because he does not have the Holy Spirit. He prattles on about this world because this world is all he has – sadly, there is no mansion waiting for him in heaven.