After WW2, industrialized food production, plus new pesticides, vaccines and antibiotics, led to a rapid increase in food production and a consequent population explosion, causing human CO2 emissions to double from 5 to 10 billion tonnes annually. So in 1959, when Pope John XXIII called for a 2nd Vatican Council to enable Catholics to adapt to the modern world, young Catholics did so by using safe new birth control methods.

But in 1968, vasectomies and contraceptive pills were roundly condemned by Pope John Paul II in his Encyclical Humanae Vitae. This gave self-righteous clergy and Pro-lifers the opportunity to threaten hellfire on millions of young Catholics, mainly poor working class girls, and thus ruin their lives.

Meanwhile these same virtuous clergy and laity ignored the human-produced CO2 and CH4 emissions that by 1980 had doubled again from 10 to 20 billion tonnes annually, as the world population continued to explode from the 2 billion of WW2 to 4 billion.

Instead, these so-called ‘pro-lifers’ became intoxicated with the magic lifestyle obtained from their ever-increasing consumption of beef and insecticide-sprayed plants, throw-away household goods, cement, petrol, diesel and jet fuel, and from the non-stop destruction of forest lands; a veritable Fool’s Carnival of pride, greed, luxury, gluttony, sloth and disregard for homeostasis, the fundamental law governing all life.

We had to wait until a generation later, in 2015, 103 years too late, when 7 billion consumers were now producing 35 billion tonnes of deadly gases annually, that Pope Francis issued the Encyclical Laudato Si’, wrist-slapping Catholics for their participation in the evils of pollution, climate change, a lack of clean water, loss of biodiversity, and an overall decline in human life and a breakdown of society.

"Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years... Every creature, from the tiniest insect to the mightiest tree, plays a vital role in the grand symphony of creation...  Living our vocation to be protectors of God's handiwork is essential to a life of virtue."

How many thunderous denunciations have we heard from the pulpit condemning to hell industrialized dairy farmers and overseas jet holiday makers? How many angry crowds of Pro-lifers have we heard picketing oil refineries and cement works?

How many TV news items have we watched of Catholic bishops going to Rome in freighters, or on sailing ships, or going outdoors and personally planting 100 trees before a taking a jet to Rome?

In Waiouru, ecumenical Catholics and Anglicans share the same building. But what announcements have we heard about how the land and the 500 million dollars for building a giant new reinforced concrete Catholic Cathedral in Christchurch will instead be used to build wooden homes for the city’s 6000+ homeless?

The silence has been deafening.

Too many ‘Christian’ leaders have ignored Laudato Si’ and still keep silent as their flocks go on consuming and destroying other species as usual, while in the USA, so-called Pro-life Christians were the decisive voting bloc in electing a pro-global-warming President.

2. Homeostasis

At St Augustine’s College in the 1950s, the Marist Fathers taught me chemistry, and when I joined the Marist Brothers of the Schools in 1960, I was also ordered to study and teach biology, the science of life.

I learnt that the first and greatest commandment for maintaining life at all levels is to maintain homeostasis, and later I taught hundreds of Catholic students that it was essential to keep a stable osmotic pressure in cells, to maintain stable cell numbers in an individual, to keep births and deaths matching the sustainable food supplies of a population, to keep an ecosystem complex, and to keep the earth, air, fire and water of our planet Earth’s biosphere in a dynamic balance.

I was also taught that the first and greatest commandment for us humans included using all our mind to care for all the world’s humans, present and future (Luke 10:27) which indigenous peoples did by caring for the animals, plants and elements of their communal world in the same loving way that God had created it. (Genesis 1:28).

Our earth/biosphere was filled with its maximum sustainable human population about a century ago. If the Pope and his Vatican theologians had lovingly used all of their minds when banning artificial birth control methods such as condoms, the pill, and vasectomies, they would have also banned artificial death control methods like fossil fuels, chlorinated drinking water, vaccines, motor ambulances and hospital ICUs, in order to maintain homeostasis in our population numbers. But they didn’t, and therefore disobeyed His first and greatest commandment.

Population-science prophets warned Vatican Cardinals and Catholic bishops 52 years ago that there were limits to human population growth when MIT scientists’ used computer calculations to predict that if people continued with business as usual, then in the 2020s our population would reach 6.5 billion, our resources would be nearly used up, and the biosphere, God’s world, would reach a tipping point.

Since then, more fossil fuel and mineral resources have been found, enabling our population to rise to 8 billion. The latest 2023 computer printout forecasts an even more apocalyptic drop in population numbers, and much longer lasting effects of pollutants.

In order to feed 8 billion, more and more long-term pollutants have been released; more polluting greenhouse gases and more synthetic insecticides that are Persistant Organic Pollutants. Not only have the POPs killed the insect pests eating crops, they are now right through the environment and are killing the good insects that pollinate plants, maintain soil fertility, and provide food for birds other animals that help maintain homeostasis. Insect Apocalypse.

The ever-increasing use of toxic organic chemicals had already wiped out 50% of the insects responsible for pollinating our grandchildren’s food crops, and insect numbers are dropping by 1% annually. In some countries, 75% of insects have been annihilated.

We had insects splattered all over our windscreen at night when I was a kid. How many insects hit your windscreen when you drive home at night now?

Furthermore, the POPs are fat-soluble and not excreted, so their concentrations build up in larger animals, including humans, leading to more and more cancers and many more spontaneous abortions.

If Christian leaders in the 1960s had fought for population control with the same energy they put into their anti-contraception fight, then in the 2090s there would have been 2 billion happy healthy people worshipping God in a peaceful abundant world.

But now there will be less than a billion sickly individuals in tribes fighting each other for survival in a toxic landscape wracked by extremes of burning droughts and cyclonic winds and floods.

And just as the Catholic leadership never apologized until this year for the priestly pedophilia that they knew about 100 years ago, I suppose there will not be a public apology until the 2070s for the harm done by Humanae Vitae 100 years previously.

I suppose you could excuse Catholics and other Christians for following this deadly cult of Consumerism by saying it is too difficult to resist consuming. This would mean we are not really Homo sapiens with full knowledge and free will, and thus capable of committing mortal sins, but Homo lemmingi who must follow herd behaviour and thus can never sin gravely. This would explain why so few go to Confession these days, eh?

3. Religion

The word reLIGion means to be bound together again, as in LIGament and re-aLIGn. A religious person is one whose values, actions, beliefs and relationships are all in line with each other and with reality. “He’s really got his sh*t together, man.”

In our Catholic schools’ Biology classes, I was one of hundreds of teachers worldwide who taught that our living world was created by the evolution of increasingly complex networks of species, and then in our Christian Doctrine classes we taught it was created by God. This left our students’ minds torn apart.

Many of our students have stopped going to church and become rationalists, losing that loving spirit for others of different cultures and of future generations.

Many other former students have found that giving and receiving love within their church community is their one true reality in life. By taking bible stories literally, they have stopped believing in the facts of biology, including the reality of the consequences of ignoring homeostasis.

Both groups have lost their bond with reality: they are now literally ‘lost souls.’

Life science teaches us that a species flourishes when it evolves a new capability, and eons ago our ancestors flourished when they genetically evolved a collective unconscious in their minds which associated abstract concepts with archetypal images. These promoted communal rituals that bonded them long-term into larger groups giving greater mutual support. This faculty resides in our associative “right-brain.”

These archetypes are known as spirits, and their stories all reinforce truths and values essential for our survival; eg taniwha, ghosts, Maui, Gaia, Molech, Mammon, Yahweh.

Carl Jung noted that spirits are a psychological reality related to the principle of life itself: they are a prerequisite of both personal and cultural development and transformation.

Consuming societies “worship Mammon” with communal rituals that promote self-gratification. They are civilizations where the collective unconscious is ruled by Freud’s Id. These tend to collapse when standards of living drop and violence increases. There is a loss of technology and of cultural identity, a downfall of government, and a rise in violence. These civilizations have lasted for an average of just over 300 years. Our Western industrial civilization began in the 1500s. Do the maths.

Enduring societies “worship God” with communal rituals that promote self-denial and a sense of responsibility. They are tribal societies where the collective unconscious is ruled by Freud’s Super-ego.

We also have a literal “left-brain” in our minds for processing facts to deal with short-term individual survival. In our Western Industrial culture, both the rationalists and the religious fundamentalists have been culturally trained to use only the “left-brain” half of their mind, and they have misinterpreted truth-telling right-brain spiritual stories as literal left-brain facts, with disastrous consequences.

The truth of Christianity is that Jesus died 2000 years ago and WE are now the physical body of his Christ spirit of self-denying love. When we all ‘die’ psychologically to self-centredness, we then enter a ‘kingdom’ of happiness within our community. I experienced that in our 1940s-60s Mangamahu community.