ROME
Bloomberg Politics
In Rome last week, a Vatican official who had already seen Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment had this advice for a visiting American who was concerned that the pontiff was about to blame man for changing the Earth’s climate: You might not want to read it, then.
That’s one way Catholics have been able to avoid the disagreeable experience of ever disagreeing with their pope: Just play dumb and keep walkin’. Another strategy, though—and one that’s become far more blatant under Francis—is to try and influence him by passing messages through those around him. Lobbying, in other words.
In the months leading up to the release of the encyclical, conservative American Catholics and even the oil and gas industry sent emissaries to the Vatican hoping to dissuade the Holy Father from weighing in on climate change, arguing that the science isn’t settled and that cutting back on fossil fuel use would hurt rather than help the world’s poor. Exxon Mobil sent several delegations to meet with Vatican officials, and a conservative Chicago-based think tank, the Heartland Institute, held a whole counter-conference on alternative climate science in Rome at the end of April. But the Pope was apparently unmoved, and the encyclical states “there is a very consistent scientific consensus that indicates that we are witnessing a worrying warming of the climatic system…Humanity is called to take conscience of the need to change life styles, ways of production and consumption to fight this warming, or at least the human causes that produce it or accentuate it.”
Conservatives aren’t the only ones who have been lobbying. Ahead of Francis’s September trip to the U.S., both left- and right-leaning believers, as well as secular groups, are offering him their unsolicited counsel. Earlier this month, a delegation of about 20 American community organizers and union leaders stressed to the Vatican officials they met with how important they feel it is that Pope Francis use his U.S. pulpit to preach on criminal justice and immigration reform and institutional racism. They also want him to talk as specifically and forcefully as possible about pay so low it doesn’t add up to a “living wage”—a phrase coined by the American priest John A. Ryan in his doctoral thesis at Catholic University way back in 1906.
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