Papal letter on climate change coming very soon.
ROME – Pope Francis leaves Monday for a week-long trip to Sri Lanka and the Philippines, the seventh foreign journey of his papacy and his second to Asia after visiting South Korea last August.
Like his recent appointment of 15 new voting-age cardinals, featuring 10 from outside the West, this trip cements Francis as the “Pope of a Global Village.”
Ever since he was installed as the first pope named for the nature-loving St. Francis of Assisi, Francis has called for greater attention to caring for God’s creation.Speculation has been mounting about how far Francis will take that call in his forthcoming encyclical on ecology: Environmentalists hope that the document, expected sometime this spring, will help jump-start stalled international efforts to curb climate change.
But those who reject scientific findings that climate change is man-made are already condemning the pope for taking up the issue at all.
Maureen Mullarkey of First Things, a conservative U.S. Catholic journal, wrote in a recent blog post that Francis is “imprudent” and “sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.”
One theme of the Jan. 12-19 trip will be climate change. During his stay in the Philippines he will visit Tacloban, where Typhoon Haiyan killed 6,300 people in 2013.
Sri Lanka is among the Asian countries experts say will see sea level rises likely to displace people and adversely affect tourism and fisheries.
The Vatican says Francis, who is preparing an encyclical on the environment, will speak about the issue several times.
However, Francis is not the first pope to tackle environmental issues, and not even the first to address climate change directly.
His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, took steps to make the Vatican the first fully carbon-neutral state by installing solar panels and buying carbon offsets. The panels reduce the need for the Vatican to burn fossil fuels, the major source of so-called greenhouse gases that scientists say trap heat in the atmosphere. Buying carbon offsets, or credits, funds projects that reduce carbon emissions.
In his World Day of Peace message in 2010, the retired pope specifically cited climate change as a threat to “human rights, such as the right to life, food, health, and development.”
“Can we remain indifferent,” he asked, “before the problems associated with such realities as climate change, desertification, the deterioration and loss of productivity in vast agricultural areas, the pollution of rivers and aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the increase of natural catastrophes, and the deforestation of equatorial and tropical regions?”
He also voiced support for the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2011, urging participants to “reach agreement on a responsible, credible response” to climate change.
Before that, Pope John Paul II wrote about an “ecological crisis” in 1990, and in 1971, Pope Paul VI called environmental degrading “a wide-ranging social problem” that risks turning humanity into “the victim of this degradation.”
In the United States, Catholic bishops released a statement on climate change in 2001, in which they said “the United States bears a special responsibility in its stewardship of God’s creation to shape responses that serve the entire human family.”
If the Pope is concerned about AGW and wants to help out in reducing the impacts of CO2 emissions, he might want to reconsider the papal ban on birth control.
Most countries have quite effective birth control programmes in spite of the church – besides contraception, it has been shown that empowerment of women, growing prosperity and education all have an effect. It is another area where this Pope, the first from the developing world, might make an impact. While he may not shift the conservatism of the Catholic Church in his lifetime, his question “Who am it to to judge those who seek the Lord in good faith?” sets the right tone.
To show my own bias, I have parted company from the Catholic Church many years ago. But I like and respect this Pope, so far. I could see myself drawn back to it as a moral community, but not as a faith.
Maureen Mullarkey of First Things, a conservative U.S. Catholic journal…
I know that nit-picking about spelling errors is in bad form, but shouldn’t “Maureen Mullarkey” be spelled “Maureen Malarkey”?