Pope Francis is unequivocal in his call for urgent action on climate change

From an Article by Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill, June 19, 2020

The Vatican on Thursday urged Catholics to divest from fossil fuels, a call made in church documents warning against the dangers of climate change.

The 225-page encyclical, which is sent to all bishops within the church, also encouraged divesting from arms as well as monitoring sectors like mining to ensure they are not damaging the environment.

The document, “Journeying Towards Care For Our Common Home,” argues people “could favor positive changes … by excluding from their investments companies that do not satisfy certain parameters,” according to Reuters.

That includes environmental factors, along with monitoring for human rights abuses like child labor.

It goes on to suggest that Catholics “shun companies that are harmful to human or social ecology, such as abortion and armaments, and to the environment, such as fossil fuels.”

Pope Francis has repeatedly urged action on climate change, calling on countries to uphold the Paris climate accord and admonishing oil and gas executives.

“Time is running out. Deliberations must go beyond mere exploration of what can be done and concentrate on what needs to be done from today onward,” he told a group of oil executives gathered at the Vatican last year.

“We do not have the luxury of waiting for others to step forward or of prioritizing short-term economic benefits. The climate crisis requires our decisive action, here and now,” he said.

The Vatican has said it does not invest in fossil fuels.

The latest document marks the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’s encyclical calling for protection of nature, life and defenseless people.

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See also: New Vatican Document Urges Fossil Fuel Divestment to Serve Planet and the Common Good, John Queally, Common Dreams, June 18, 2020

The Vatican’s call for divestment is a breath of hope in times when faith is more needed than ever,” said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. “It is a powerful statement that attempting to profit off the destruction of the planet is plainly and simply immoral and unethical.”

Webinar — Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

SPEAKER — Mary Evelyn TUCKER, Senior Lecturer, Senior Research Scholar, and Codirector of the Forum of Religion and Ecology, Yale University

HOST — Irina A. FASKIANOS, Vice President for National Program and Outreach, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

FASKIANOS: Hello and welcome to you all. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at the Council on Foreign Relations. We’ve been convening these calls for a long time, but this is our first one with video. So it will be a new experience for all of us.

As a reminder, today’s call is on the record. The video and transcript are available as well as on our podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy.

We are delighted to have Mary Evelyn Tucker with us today. Mary Evelyn Tucker is co-director, with John Grim, of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University, where they teach. This week, they have just released a new website for the Forum after a year of preparation. It has a comprehensive section on religion and climate change. You can find the website at Fore.Yale.edu. And they also announced a new partnership of the Forum with the U.N. Environment Programme’s Faith for Earth. So we will circulate the website at the conclusion of this event.

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim have organized ten conferences and books on world religions and ecology at Harvard, and they convened the first conference on religion and climate change in 2000. As you all know, she’s co-author of Journey of the Universe, a book and an Emmy Award-winning film that aired on PBS. And this week, she, John Grim, and Sam Mickey have also released an online open-source book called Living Earth Community.

TUCKER: Well, thank you very much, Irina, and thanks to all who are on this call. And I also want to say from the very beginning that we recognize religions have their problems and they have their promise. We need not go into the problems historically or even at present, but we’re trying to concentrate, what is the moral force of religions, and how can we draw on that for climate change action and thinking and writing?

I also want to just say that for almost fifty years the field of interreligious dialogue has been hugely helpful for this coalition of religion and climate change. And there’s a number of people on this call — the Parliament of the World’s Religions’ Kusumita Pedersen; and Azza Karam from Religions for Peace; and people who have been working in Christian-Muslim dialogue and Jewish-Christian dialogue, John Polakowski and so on; and the Temple of Understanding, Grove Harris — so there’s been a lot of people working on interreligious dialogue and then trying to bring the religions forward towards the environment and climate change. And we thank them for this effort and just say that there’s many, many others, some of whom I’ll mention during this talk today, this little gathering.

I wanted to then go historically to say that probably one of the first conferences on religion and climate change came after we did the Harvard conferences in the ’90s, and this was in 2000 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences which resulted in a book in 2001 in the journal Daedalus: Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? And George Rupp was there. He was president of Columbia at the time. I think he’s on this call. We had a scientist, Mike McElroy, from Harvard. We had an ethicist, Baird Callicott. We had someone from law, Don Brown. And we had Bill McKibben as an activist and writer. And then folded into that context of other disciplines and other perspectives we had people from the different world religions speaking to what they offer to transition to climate change adaptation and so on.

And that’s the spirit that I want to just bring forward in this little moment of discussion, that dialogue is key. Religions in some ways are late to these various issues. Science and policy have been working on them for a long time, but religions are absolutely necessary. And more and more, science and policy are realizing that.

And I want to then just move to some leadership that has happened over the last twenty years, and to say that I’m going to concentrate here a little bit on the Christian churches, but much has been happening in the various world religions. But the World Council of Churches, with the work of Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, who’s also on this call, has helped to move the Protestant churches forward, and even towards divestment.

Two great leaders that we should note of the Orthodox Church. Bartholomew, who leads eight hundred million Greek Orthodox, and he has been one of the earliest spokespersons on the theology and the practice of climate change and so on, calling even what we’ve been doing ecological sin and crimes against creation. John Chryssavgis has been one of his great champions and writers and so on to bring this message forward. And he, the patriarch had conferences on climate change in Greenland, in the Amazon, in the Mississippi.

I want to move then to Pope Francis, who is a good friend of the patriarch, and they’ve worked together on many things. And we know that we’re coming up on the fifth year anniversary of Laudato Si’, which means “praise be.” So this was an encyclical address to the Christian churches, but to all peoples around the world, and this encyclical has been able to, when it was launched, illustrate this importance of dialogue, because the pope wasn’t there at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences but there were three key people who were. One was the key Orthodox theologian, John of Pergamon, indicating we need ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. Secondly, there was John Schellnhuber, who was a German scientist, head of the Potsdam Climate Research Institute, the largest in the world, over two hundred scientists, and he helped with the encyclical. And third, Cardinal Turkson, who’s originally from Ghana, to indicate the developing world, issues of equity, and so on need to be synergized. So that was very, very symbolic.

And the encyclical has helped bring together in remarkable ways a sense of climate justice, of ecojustice, and that’s because the pope in this encyclical was able to really synergize people and planet, especially in this phrase “cry of the Earth, cry of the poor,” which came from Leonardo Boff, a liberation theologian from Brazil. And that was a book published in 1997 in a series we’ve been working on from Orbis called Ecology and Justice. And that phrase, that the vulnerable are going to be most affected certainly by climate change, and so are ecosystems — as we know, they’re unraveling, their fragmented qualities, and the increase of weather-related—hurricanes and so on. So this synergy of climate justice and ecojustice has been so important from the encyclical and from this blending of humans and earth.

Now, that statement — that encyclical got statements and response from all the world’s religions, which is on our Forum website. But even prior to that, there have been statements of climate change, climate justice, and so on from the world’s religions. So this has been going on for at least twelve to fifteen years.

Now, broadly speaking, the Baha’is, the Sikhs, the Asian traditions, the Abrahamic traditions, and certainly indigenous traditions, have been more and more active, and that’s what I just want to highlight a little bit here. Even in 1990, the Catholic bishops had a statement on global warming. The Evangelical Environmental Network and Mitch Hescox, who has a book on this, has been very active for more than twenty years. Katharine Hayhoe has been speaking out on climate change, especially for Evangelical groups.

Now, we can say, then, going forward we have theology moving forward, all kinds of books, and books that also illustrate people’s transformations. One I just want to mention is Rooted and Rising, which are case studies of people who have this ecological conversion that the pope is talking about. And Leah Schade and Margaret Bullitt-Jonas did that book. Jim Antal did one of the best books, I think, on Climate Church, Climate World.

And next week — I want to give a special shout-out because sermons by these people and Nancy Wright as well are up on the website. Next week there’s going to be a whole festival of homilies. Eleven thousand people signed up to hear homilies on climate change. This is a watershed moment, and a lot of people have been involved in creating that.

Greening of seminaries have been going on for fifteen years. We’ve got a lot of people working on that, Laurel Kearns and so on. And that means both changing practices of carbon footprint as well as curriculum.

Now, again, let’s move to action, and then I’ll finish up so we have time for questions. But let me say some of the early movements here— Interfaith Power and Light, these interreligious groups, the Green Faith movement, Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, Blessed Tomorrow, and so on, in the Climate March in 2014, at Union Theological Seminary, Karenna Gore with Earth Ethics Center there brought together a huge number of religious leaders, and into the march ten thousand religious leaders were very much part of it. Fletcher Harper helped to organize that as well.

But what I want to say is we’re moving from theological statements and so on, from protest movements, to action. We have still a long, long way to go. But I want to highlight one movement that I think is very, very important, and that’s the financial leverage of religious institutions and so on. Now, the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility in New York has been working for almost fifty years on this issue, and Seamus Finn is here, and they’re trying to do shareholder engagement with corporations on climate change and a variety of issues. And that’s because religious communities helped to start CSR, corporate social responsibility, when they said, how are we going to invest our pension funds? So they’ve been spurring this movement for a long, long time. There are three hundred members of this organization.

And then I want to suggest that the divest-invest movement — there’s $14 trillion now committed to this area, started ten years ago, spurred by Bill McKibben and many, many others. But religious communities have been central. The Unitarians, the United Church of Christ with Jim Antal’s help, the Shalom Center, the World Council of Churches, the Church of England, all of these have divested. And the religious communities have a very high percentage in this number that I’ve just mentioned. Religious institutions—Union Theological Seminary, Georgetown University, Dayton University, Seattle University—150 Catholic institutions and foundations have pledged to divest.

So to divest is also to invest, of course, in green technology, alternative technologies, and so on, and the religious communities have been helping in this movement, like Stop the Money Pipeline, right? Now JPMorgan Chase is being pressured to stop investing in oil and pipeline. BlackRock, the investment firm, tremendous pressure. And Liberty Mutual, the insurance company. So Bill McKibben just did an article in the New York Times, as well; between the moral force of divestment and the economics of oil prices collapsing, we’re seeing some very significant changes.

And finally, I want to give a huge shout-out to the youth movement, again, supported by the moral force of religious and spiritual and ethical people around the planet: the Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future, certainly Greta Thunberg—what a moral force she is—and this broad coalition of Extinction Rebellion.

Finally, let me say that the voices of indigenous peoples, especially through the Indigenous Environmental Network, have been persistent, relentless, and courageous, because they have understood that the deepest sensibilities of human-Earth relations comes from the voice of the Earth, from the magnificent water systems, ecosystems, mountains, forests, and so on that speak to us, and that’s part of this Living Earth Community book that we’re talking about. But across North America and around the world, we can look at Standing Rock in the Dakotas with the Hunkpapa Sioux saying water is sacred — water is sacred. That was the dimension and the basis of their protest. We’ve got Anishinaabe people in Minnesota, across British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest these protest movements linked with indigenous peoples and other groups.

Finally, the statement that came out of Bolivia, Cochabamba, thirty thousand indigenous peoples who gathered there and released the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in 2015. Such a magnificent and powerful statement. And now we have an interfaith rainforest initiative sponsored by United Nations Environment Programme, the Norwegian government, and many religious groups, like the Forum on Religion and Ecology, to say: These are the caretakers of our forests. These are the people that we must unite with and support. Other religious communities, Christians and others, must give the voice of indigenous peoples their due.

So let me end with this note. There’s so many things we could have mentioned, and we’ll get to some of them in the discussion. But thank you all for being here.

Truth, honesty and morality are on trial on Earth

From an Article distributed by the Associated Press, The Guardian UK, July 6, 2018

Pope Francis urged governments on Friday to make good on their commitments to curb global warming, warning that climate change, continued unsustainable development and rampant consumption threatens to turn the Earth into a vast pile of “rubble, deserts and refuse”.

Francis made the appeal at a Vatican conference marking the third anniversary of his landmark environmental encyclical “Praise Be.” The document, meant to spur action at the 2015 Paris climate conference, called for a paradigm shift in humanity’s relationship with Mother Nature.

In his remarks, Francis urged governments to honor their Paris commitments and said institutions such as the IMF and World Bank had important roles to play in encouraging reforms promoting sustainable development.

“There is a real danger that we will leave future generations only rubble, deserts and refuse,” he warned.

The Paris accord, reached by 195 countries, seeks to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change by curbing global greenhouse gas emissions via individual, non-binding national plans. President Donald Trump has said the US will pull out of the accord negotiated by his predecessor unless he can get a better deal.

Friday’s conference was the latest in a series of Vatican initiatives meant to impress a sense of urgency about global warming and the threat it poses in particular to the world’s poorest and most marginalised people.

Recently, Francis invited oil executives and investors to the Vatican for a closed-door conference where he urged them to find alternatives to fossil fuels. He warned climate change was a challenge of “epochal proportions”.

Next year, Francis has called a three-week synod, or meeting of bishops, specifically to address the church’s response to the ecological crisis in the Amazon, where deforestation threatens what he has called the “lung” of the planet and the indigenous peoples who live there

On Friday, Francis also thanked aid groups that rescue and care for migrants and denounced the “sterile hypocrisy” of those who turn a blind eye to the world’s poor seeking security and a dignified life.

Francis celebrated a mass for migrants and those who care for them in St Peter’s Basilica, calling attention to their plight as Europe, the US and other countries increasingly closing their doors, ports and borders to them.

The intimate service marked the fifth anniversary of Francis’ landmark visit to Lampedusa, the Sicilian island that for years was the primary destination of migrants smuggled from Libya to Europe. During that trip, Francis’ first outside Rome after his 2013 election, he denounced the “globalisation of indifference” that the world showed migrants fleeing war, poverty and climate-induced natural disasters.

Speaking in his native Spanish, Francis thanked the representatives of aid groups in the pews for embodying the Good Samaritan “who stopped to save the life of the poor man beaten by bandits”.

“He didn’t ask where he was from, his reasons for travelling or his documents. he simply decided to care for him and save his life,” the pope said.

>>>>>> See also: Big Oil CEOs needed a climate change reality check. The Pope delivered | Bill McKibben, June 14, 2018

The Pope has Plans in 2015

Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches

From an Article by John Vidal, The Guardian, December 27, 2014

The Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church hopes to inspire action at next year’s UN meeting in Paris in December after visits to Philippines and New York.

He has been called the “superman pope”, and it would be hard to deny that Pope Francis has had a good December. Cited by President Barack Obama as a key player in the thawing relations between the US and Cuba, the Argentinian pontiff followed that by lecturing his cardinals on the need to clean up Vatican politics. But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?

It looks as if he will give it a go. In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world’s main religions.

The reason for such frenetic activity, says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is the pope’s wish to directly influence next year’s crucial UN climate meeting in Paris, when countries will try to conclude 20 years of fraught negotiations with a universal commitment to reduce emissions.

“Our academics supported the pope’s initiative to influence next year’s crucial decisions,” Sorondo told Cafod, the Catholic development agency, at a meeting in London. “The idea is to convene a meeting with leaders of the main religions to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”

Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology. Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners.

According to Vatican insiders, Francis will meet other faith leaders and lobby politicians at the general assembly in New York in September, when countries will sign up to new anti-poverty and environmental goals.

In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.

“The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands.

“The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.

In Lima last month, bishops from every continent expressed their frustration with the stalled climate talks and, for the first time, urged rich countries to act. Sorondo, a fellow Argentinian who is known to be close to Pope Francis, said: “Just as humanity confronted revolutionary change in the 19th century at the time of industrialisation, today we have changed the natural environment so much. If current trends continue, the century will witness unprecedented climate change and destruction of the ecosystem with tragic consequences.”

According to Neil Thorns, head of advocacy at Cafod, said: “The anticipation around Pope Francis’s forthcoming encyclical is unprecedented. We have seen thousands of our supporters commit to making sure their MPs know climate change is affecting the poorest communities.”

However, Francis’s environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles, particularly in the US – where Catholic climate sceptics also include John Boehner, Republican leader of the House of Representatives and Rick Santorum, the former Republican presidential candidate.

Cardinal George Pell, a former archbishop of Sydney who has been placed in charge of the Vatican’s budget, is a climate change sceptic who has been criticised for claiming that global warming has ceased and that if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were doubled, then “plants would love it”.

Dan Misleh, director of the Catholic climate covenant, said: “There will always be 5-10% of people who will take offence. They are very vocal and have political clout. This encyclical will threaten some people and bring joy to others. The arguments are around economics and science rather than morality.

“A papal encyclical is rare. It is among the highest levels of a pope’s authority. It will be 50 to 60 pages long; it’s a big deal. But there is a contingent of Catholics here who say he should not be getting involved in political issues, that he is outside his expertise.”

Francis will also be opposed by the powerful US evangelical movement, said Calvin Beisner, spokesman for the conservative Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has declared the US environmental movement to be “un-biblical” and a false religion.

“The pope should back off,” he said. “The Catholic church is correct on the ethical principles but has been misled on the science. It follows that the policies the Vatican is promoting are incorrect. Our position reflects the views of millions of evangelical Christians in the US.”

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

"NO TO FRACKING" (Argentina or elsewhere)

Watch Pope Francis Message of May 21, 2014: Polluting is Sinful

On Wednesday, Pope Francis took climate change deniers and corporate polluters to task and made the religious case for tackling climate change, imploring his fellow Christians to become “Custodians of Creation” and sounding the alarm bells about the catastrophic effects of global climate change.

In front of a very large crowd in Rome, the Pope gave a short address in which he made the case that the “beauty of nature and the grandeur of the cosmos” is indeed a Christian value:

“Safeguard Creation,” he said. “Because if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us! Never forget this!”

According to ThinkProgress:

The pope centered his environmentalist theology around the biblical creation story in the book of Genesis, where God is said to have created the world, declared it “good,” and charged humanity with its care. Francis also made reference to his namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi, who was a famous lover of animals, and appeared to tie the ongoing environmental crisis to economic concerns — namely, instances where a wealthy minority exploits the planet at the expense of the poor.

“Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will; or, even less, is the property of only a few: Creation is a gift, it is a wonderful gift that God has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude,” Pope Francis said.

“But when we exploit Creation we destroy the sign of God’s love for us, in destroying Creation we are saying to God: ‘I don’t like it! This is not good!’ ‘So what do you like?’ ‘I like myself!’ – Here, this is sin! Do you see?”

See an Article here.

Also, watch the video here.