The "Kinder, Gentler" Pope

[Recusant]

Back to the distinguished gentleman with the extravagant headgear. . .  On the spectrum between Luddite (does it really need the "neo-" prefix?) and enthusiastic early adopter, he definitely lies closest to Luddite.

"Pope Francis' Tech Doomerism Shows the Church Is Still Backwards as Hell" | Daily Beast

Progressives rightly treat the Catholic Church's conservative attitudes towards medical innovations—such as IVF, contraception and abortion—as regressive and puritanical. Yet, when it comes to other technologies, the Vatican gets a pass, if not praise for applying similar logic—even when there is less theological justification.

Pope Francis has decried video games, as did his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, playing into unfounded concerns about its culpability for mass shootings. In 2019, Francis lent support for weakening encryption when he called for a "balance" between privacy and protecting children from predators.

The same year he said nuclear power should not be used until safety can be guaranteed on a trip to Fukushima—ignoring the unique circumstances of that accident, the impossible goal of "absolute safety," and the widespread exaggeration of risk.

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Only a week before he decried surrogacy as a "disgusting" act, Pope Francis warned in a message for World Peace Day about the possible threat of AI including "technological dictatorship," war, and misinformation. The statement began lauding the salvation scientific and technological development has offered mankind thus far—crediting it as a manifestation of the holy spirit.

This rhetoric mimicked Pope John Paul II, who once said that GMOs could be "a disaster for the health of man and the future of earth" if not heavily regulated, with a brief note of possible upsides. In retrospect, over-regulation of GMOs driven by that very same alarmism caused millions of preventable deaths and slowed the creation of crops that reduce environmental harm—a fact pointed out this week in an open letter to the EU by a number of Nobel laureates. The same pope had a long history of alarmist statements regarding rapid advances in biotechnology, including genetic engineering, organ transplants, and in vitro fertilization (aka surrogacy).

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