With Francis now on their side, climate-change activists and scientists have higher hopes that they can save the world.
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Pope Francis’s attempt to inject moral urgency into dealing with poverty, immigration and climate change is about to run into entrenched political divisions in the U.S. In that address, he is expected to underscore points he made earlier this year in issuing his climate change “encyclical”, which outlines his thoughts on the issue of global warming.
“I think most people of faith are environmentalists”.
But, most of all, I hope the pope’s message reaches those whose hearts have closed to the immigrant. Commuters from Virginia are already making other plans. “America is not a planet”, Marco Rubio remarked at last week’s GOP debate, suggesting that’s reason alone not to bother cutting emissions. Several of NBC4’s news anchors will be reporting live from the field while its team of reporters will be located all throughout the Washington metropolitan region to cover all aspects of Pope Francis’ visit to the nation’s capital. The pope’s encyclical “comes at a time when countries around the world are preparing for an important worldwide meeting at the end of the year in Paris”, Rhodes said. “And those, of course, we are free to disagree with”.
Most Rev. David Talley, above, an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Atlanta, will be in Washington for the pope’s visit.
Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, a Catholic, said he would boycott the Pope’s address to Congress. In an article published on the website Townhall.com, Gosar said, “When the Pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one“.
Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory, along with the Most Rev. Luis Ramon and the Most Rev. David Talley, the two auxiliary bishops for the Archdiocese of Atlanta, will be in Washington for the pope’s visit.
According to these results, the Francis Effect is modest, if mildly beneficial.
Francis’s papacy is disrupting a decades-long tacit political alliance between much of the US church’s hierarchy and Republican cultural conservatives that underpinned the movement of many Catholics away from the Democratic Party over the past three decades. In a July Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Francis, down from 76 percent in February 2014.
“I think we’re seeing the revelation of an animistic form in the church”, Koprowski said. The group that has lost the most faith in the Pope, not surprisingly, is conservatives: Where 72 percent held a favorable opinion of him in 2014, the number plunged to 45 percent in 2015.
Rhodes tried to distance next week’s talks between the pope and Obama from being about any one domestic policy regarding climate change. Francis’ sharp condemnation of capitalism as a driver of inequality surely plays a major role as well. “How we’re to care for the goodness of the earth”.
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The implications of that partisan divide were especially clear when prominent Republicans-and fellow Catholics-Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum bluntly told Francis to steer clear of public life, even before the release of the encyclical. “So these are broad, thematic messages that the pope has delivered that really go beyond even individual policies and get at how do we approach issues and how do we approach one another”. NBC4 will also provide viewers with logistical and important information they will need to know to help them see the Pope and get around town. His decision to visit Cuba first was among the negatives expressed.
