Pope Francis took a strong stand on anthropogenic climate change Monday, telling a gathering of diplomats in the Vatican that global warming is a result of human action.
We must not “downplay the importance of our own responsibility in interaction with nature,” Francis told the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See. “Climate changes, with the global rise in temperatures and their devastating effects, are also a consequence of human activity.”
In his statement, Pope Francis went beyond earlier declarations that seemed to exclude the Church taking a formal stand on questions of climate science.
In his 2015 teaching letter on the environment, Laudato Si, the Pope explicitly declared that “the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics.”
In the same text, Francis said that he was encouraging debate rather than trying to impose his own understanding of environmental concerns.
“On many concrete questions,” he wrote, “the Church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion; she knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts while respecting divergent views.”
Francis also said it is necessary to create “a social debate” in which of those involved in any way can explain their problems and “have access to adequate and reliable information in order to make decisions for the common good,” something rarely seen in contemporary discussions of climate change that tend to exclude climate change skeptics.
Nonetheless, with the passage of time, Pope Francis has seemed to take an ever more decided stance behind the notion of man-made global warming, while sending signals that there was not much room for debate on the issue.
In November 2016, the Pope called climate change skeptics to an “ecological conversion,” while denouncing what he believed to be a “weak reaction” from governments to the climate crisis. He also criticized “the ease with which well-founded scientific opinion about the state of our planet is disregarded.”
On that occasion, the Pope also said that politicians had been “distracted” in implementing important measures to curb carbon emissions and blamed the sluggish adoption of COP21 protocols on “an economy which seek profit above all else.”
“Never before has there been such a clear need for science to be at the service of a new global ecological equilibrium,” Francis told his audience while painting a picture of a world on the verge of “ecological collapse” and a “consequent increase of poverty and social exclusion.”
In his address to diplomats Monday, Francis continued along a similar vein, stressing the duty to leave “a more beautiful and livable world” to future generations and “to work, in the light of the commitments agreed upon in Paris in 2015, for the reduction of gas emissions that harm the atmosphere and human health.”
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I don’t know why anybody pays attention to Pope Stupid I. If his knowledge of religion is as good as his (lack of) knowledge of non-religious matters, the Catholic Church is in trouble.
Repent Pope Francis the worship of False Gods and False Deities like GAIA this pope by far is the False Pope and Satan’s Choice
It is completely pathetic that humans turn to an advocate of Bronze Age superstitions for their scientific information and guidance.
Of course, this particular Pope will be long gone before the general populace realizes that we are in an inter-glacial, tilting slowly not into a fiery, man-made apocalypse but into a perfectly predictable and natural ice age.
Seriously? Temperatures in the US just dropped below -50c LMAO! Give it a rest with your global warming garbage, you’re starting to look daft!
I’m not a Catholic and have issues with the church not related to man made climate change. On the other hand, I wish the church no harm. That is what will happen if the church takes a formal stand. When it becomes eventually becomes obvious that climate change is nothing to worry about, having taken an official stand would do a lot to discredit the church.
Could it be more clear that this Pope is completely out of his element when he attempts to preach science? The sectarian left was delighted when one of their fellow travelers was promoted to the highest position in the Catholic Church, and the climate change agenda itself became infallible dogma. What an irony. The church has made a calculation; trade political/media popularity for substance and principle to right a sinking ship.
Meanwhile, the world continues to see this small-time, ill-equipped, political ideologue dance for the left, placing leftism clearly above faith. Francis looks like a mere ant in the shadow of John Paul II, who had no time for such petty nonsense.