Papal Exagerations...

Spin. It's a lovely business. The media can't get enough of it. It helps sell newspapers from the stands. It puts cashey money into people pockets - and it sure does help put food on the table.

For the unscrupulous, which is pretty much every darned mogul in the media business today, integrity and honesty are things of the past.

Apparently especially so when it comes to the environment and the pope.

"Benedict has been on an eco-friendly campaign of late, presiding most recently over a pro-environment youth rally in the central Italian shrine town of Loreto. In addition, the Vatican has installed photovoltaic cells on the roof of its main auditorium to convert sunlight into electricity and has joined a reforestation project aimed at offsetting its CO2 emissions."

Oh really?

Seems to me there's a might bit of contradiction going on at the Vatican of late.

Now I'm not trying to suggest the Pope is contradicting himself... Just that the media is.

First the claim that the Pope was addressing a "pro-evironment youth rally" is ridiculous. This notice posted before the event paints a different view of that rally:

"The Pope will be meeting the Italian young people in Loreto, Italy next Summer from the 28th of August till the 2nd of September. Being a unique occassion, the Italians are extending the invitation to other young Europeans and Mediterraneans to enrich the Catholic Italian young people with new experiences and aquaitances. Translation in English will be available. This event is sponsored by the Italian Episcopal Conference including flights, food, lodging and pilgrim's bag. You are only required to pay Lm 35 contribution payable to KDZ."

That's right Batman, no mention of enviro-nothing.

If that wasn't enough check out the Vatican Information Services take on the rally:

VATICAN CITY, SEP 1, 2007 (VIS) - Shortly after 4 p.m. today, the Pope departed by helicopter from the pontifical residence at Castelgandolfo bound for the Italian shrine of Loreto where he presided at a national meeting of young people concluding the first year of the "Agora" of Italian youth. The event is being promoted by the Italian Episcopal Conference.

Further the VIS claims 300,000 young people attended. Not the nearly half of million claimed by the media. This is the first time I have ever heard of a Catholic rally where the numbers of people were inflated by media sources over that of what rally organizers said there was. Usually it's the other way around.

LifeSiteNews's Phil Lawler completely debunks this Pope enviro-thon better than I can - and in particular the claim that the Vatican made itself "carbon-neutral". In Actually it was a private firm that did exactly that as a donation to the Catholic Church.

Has the Pope been talking about the environment more than usual of late? Of course he has - who isn't? But to suggest the Pope has turned "Green" is a shameless way to generate controversy by a global media machine that has no real news to report.

Monsignor Petrio's latest speech to the UN sums up the official Catholic Church's position on climate change very well:

The monsignor identified two attitudes that are particularly harmful to creation and humanity: The first is the “fundamentally reckless” approach in which people say, “we should actually exploit our world to the full, with little or no heed to the consequences, using a world view supposedly based on faith." The second approach is to treat the earth as the only good, and characterize[s] humanity as an irredeemable threat to the earth, whose population and activity need to be controlled by various drastic means."

With the latest round of Papal exagerations perpetrated by the mainstream media I'm thinking globally the world tends to the second attitude rather than the first.