“As Catholic and evangelical leaders, we are deeply inspired by Pope Francis’ encyclical addressing our shared responsibility to be prudent stewards of creation”, the ad reads. The document issued by the leader of more than one billion Catholics around the world is expected to be an important signal on the road to a global agreement on emissions reductions, to be negotiated by governments at the world climate summit in Paris later this year.
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In his wide-ranging address, Pope Francis spoke about pollution, climate change, water, biodiversity, inequality, poverty, economics, consumerism and spirituality.
The almost 200-page “Laudato Si,” or “Praise Be To You” calls for urgent action on climate change along with a condemnation of the global economic system, which it says plunders the earth’s resources while leaving the poor to largely suffer the consequences. A recent Nasa space agency survey showed that 97 percent of climate scientists agree global warming is most likely due to human activity. Still, he managed last week to mesh those qualities with his larger obligation to practice leadership and assertion for 1.2 billion Catholics, as well as for much of the rest of the world’s faithful. “We must also protect the world’s poor, who have done the least to contribute to this looming crisis and stand to lose the most if we fail to avert it”.
The first meeting of this sort took place in October a year ago, with Francis then warning the bishops against the temptation to “transform bread into stone and throw it against the sinners, the weak, and the sick – to turn [it] into ‘unbearable burdens.’”. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, recently said: “Climate change is a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement”.
Supporters of Catholic aid agency CAFOD in Daventry have already begun responding to the Pope’s rallying call. And chances are that that Catholic book isn’t a papal encyclical. This one simple phrase out of many pages, has created what is being called the “political earthquake” that Pope Francis is now facing over his statements about the environment and the doomsday that may come as a result of ignoring it, putting him under the eyes of politicians.
As religious believers of different faiths, we share a common belief that the Earth has been entrusted to humankind as a gift, to be cherished and protected.
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“Plenty of scientific studies point out that the last decades of global warming have been mostly caused by the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxide and others) especially generated by human action”, the pontiff wrote.
