The Freethinker award for the most absurd (and funniest) quote of the week goes to the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell.

My task as a Christian leader is to engage with reality, to contribute to debate on important issues, to open people’s minds and to point out when the emperor is wearing few or no clothes.

A Catholic leader engaging in reality? Do us all a favour!

His words came when a bitter rift developed this month between Pell and Canberra Bishop George Browning, the Anglican Church’s global environmental chief, over global warming.

The battle of words, which sounds like a confrontation between The Vicar of Dibley and Father Ted, developed when Browning accused Cardinal Pell of making no sense on climate change challenges, and of being out of with his own church.

At the national Anglican synod in Canberra, Bishop Browning attacked the cardinal for saying Jesus said nothing about climate change.

The Anglican bishop said:

It’s almost unbelievable. I wrote him a letter saying Jesus had an awful lot to say about the rich taking what belonged to the poor and about the heritage of the children, and as he spoke about both of these things he spoke about climate change.

Later, he said that Cardinal Pell was an exception even in his own church.

I frankly don’t know where he’s coming from or why he says what he does. It doesn’t make any sense to me. The contribution he should make as leader of the Catholic Church is muted because of his stance.

Cardinal Pell replied that church leaders should be allergic to nonsense.

Radical environmentalists are more than up to the task of moralising their own agenda and imposing it on people through fear. They don’t need church leaders to help them with this, although it is a very effective way of further muting Christian witness.

Cardinal Pell added that he was sceptical of extravagant claims of impending man-made catastrophes. However, the Vatican accepts that climate change is a serious threat to the world.

Bishop Browning said the science of global warming was settled – and accepted even by US President George Bush.

It is also settled morally. Jesus made it absolutely clear that the poor are not here to pay the bills of the rich, but that’s exactly what’s happening. If we don’t respond the people who will pay the price are in Kiribati, Torres Strait, Bangladesh and central Africa.

In alerting us to this report in The Age, Nigel Sinnott, the Freethinker’s man in Australia, commented:

I do not really know (I lack the expertise) whether human efforts, however energetic, will make significant differences to global warming and climate change.

And I am far less worried about carbon emissions than I am about humanity’s overall environmental demands. A large family in a poor “third” world country is likely to leave a quite small environmental “footprint” simply because so many of that family’s unfortunate members will die young.

It is quite another matter when right-wing individuals, used to conspicuous consumption in wealthy countries, imagine they are entitled to six children, thirty grandchildren, and so on, with ever larger houses and cars, and more expensive gadgets. The price of more people with fast-expanding First World lifestyles is massive environmental degradation (such as rainforest and wilderness destruction for cattle ranching and palm-oil production), unpleasant agricultural practices (factory farming, corporate land monopolies and monocultures), depletion of resources such as rare metals and water catchments, atmospheric pollution, and fouling of seas and rivers by agricultural and sewage run-off. (More and more people competing for less and less also leads to the rich treating the poor with contempt — as “losers” — and to stress, crime, violence and war.)

UPDATE, October 26: Bishop George Browning yesterday challenged Catholic Archbishop George Pell to a debate on climate change at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney

Bishop Browning said the challenge was serious because the issue was so important. “The moral consequences of climate change are of such an order that the church cannot remain outside the debate,” he said.

The Anglican general synod in Canberra yesterday passed an environmental canon (church law) recognising that climate change was a serious threat to present and future generations and seeking to reduce the environmental footprint of the church and its agencies.

The Age reported that Cardinal Pell had declined to comment on the challenge, but carried two amusing letters concerning the ecclesiastical catfight.

John Dorman wrote:

Bishops who engage in heated arguments about climate change are only compounding the problem.

And Patrick Hutchings observed:

George Pell knows nothing about climate change. I expect that he has still not forgiven Galileo for being right when the Pope was wrong.