The Reforecast: the World Is Quietly Correcting Itself

Everything in this reflection rests on a truth that the world's panic cannot touch and cannot see: the cosmos is not a machine left running on its own, and it is not a system we are holding up. St. Paul says that in Christ all things were created, and in Him all things hold together; the Letter to the Hebrews says that He sustains the universe by the word of His power.

St. Thomas Aquinas put the same truth in the plainest metaphysical language available to us: God is not only the cause that began things, He is the cause that keeps them in being. Creation is conserved by God at every instant; if He withdrew His sustaining hand, it would not merely deteriorate, it would fall back into nothing. The world does not continue because of its own momentum. It continues because it is held — and it is held by the One who has nail-pierced hands.

That is why the panic is not merely wrong about policy. It is wrong about the world. The Book of Wisdom says that God loves all that exists and detests nothing that He has made, and the Psalmist says that when He hides His face creatures are terrified, and when He sends forth His Spirit they are created and the face of the earth is renewed. Creation is in the hands of a Father, not in the hands of a committee.

Here is the heart of the Christian answer to climate despair, and it is not an evasion. History has an author, and He has told us how it ends. Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and of that day and hour no one knows — not the angels, and not the models. The end of the world is not something humanity can schedule, accelerate, or avert. It will be accomplished by an act of God at a time God has reserved to Himself.

And Scripture has bound that ending with promises that cannot fail. After the flood, God established an everlasting covenant with every living creature: never again shall all flesh be cut off, and while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. Our Lord said that the gospel must first be preached to all the nations, and then the end will come; He said that the gates of hell shall not prevail against His Church, and that He is with her always, to the close of the age. He said that unless those days were shortened, no human being would be saved — which means precisely that there will still be human beings to be saved.

The creation itself, St. Paul tells us, is groaning in labour pains, waiting not for its destruction but for the revealing of the sons of God — waiting for the redemption of our bodies at the resurrection. What we await is a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, and the Catechism says plainly that the visible universe is destined to be transformed, not annihilated by us. The end of the story is a wedding, not a funeral.

So let me state the claim precisely, because precision is charity here. No process that human beings set in motion will annihilate the human race. The race will not be extinguished by its own emissions, because the last act of history belongs to the returning Christ and not to a tipping point — and because God has bound Himself by covenant that it will not be so. The world may pass through fire; it will pass through it at His word, and it will be remade by His hand.

Private revelation does not add to the deposit of faith and no one is bound to believe it. But where the Church has approved it, it is a light, and the approved light has never said that the human race will end in self-inflicted extinction. Read what was actually given.

Notice what every one of these approved messages has in common. Not one of them describes the end of the human race at human hands. Each of them describes a Church under assault, a chastisement, a battle for souls, and then a peace that God gives. If we want to know the shape of the times, we already know it — and it is not a climate model. It is a war for souls, and a promise of triumph.

Set aside the science for a moment, and simply look at the shape of the thing. A global movement has arisen that tells humanity it stands under a coming judgment; that the judgment is caused by its own sin; that salvation is available if it repents and pays; that the experts are its priests; that dissent is excommunication; and that the reward of fidelity is a paradise on earth. Every one of those elements is Christian in form. Not one of them is Christian in content.

The Catechism names this precisely. It says that before the end the Church must pass through a final trial, and that the trial takes the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. And then it says this:

We are not left to guess at the enemy's method. Scripture is unsparing and specific, and what it describes is not a frontal assault on the Church. It is deception, and it is aimed at the elect.

Now consider what this particular deception costs the Church, because the cost is not primarily doctrinal. It is temporal. It is a good cause, an urgent cause, a cause that lets a Christian feel righteous and busy and relevant — and it is not the mission. Paul VI saw the pattern coming fifty years before the encyclical, and he named the temptation in the plainest terms: even generous Christians, sensitive to the dramatic questions of the hour, "are frequently tempted to reduce her mission to the dimensions of a simply temporal project."

That is the whole tragedy in one sentence. The Church was given one commission: to make disciples of all nations, to baptise, to forgive sins, to feed the faithful with the Body of Christ, and to prepare a people for the world to come. When she trades that for the management of the planet, she does not gain the world's respect; she loses the world's soul, and her own clarity with it. And the souls she was sent to save are the very people who will be told, on the last day, that they never heard the Gospel because the pulpit was occupied with a forecast.