The Malthusian Pope He uses Covid to call for anti-growth policies. Most popes urge austerity as a means of saving one’s soul. Pope Francis urges it for a different reason: to save the planet. The pope’s one-sided treatment of technology, free markets, and consumerism is astonishing. In keeping with that temporal focus, he called this last week for humans to adopt “simpler” lifestyles not for reasons of spirituality but out of “respect” for the earth: We also need once more to listen to the land itself, which Scripture calls adamah, the soil from which man, Adam, was made. Today we...