UNITED KINGDOM
Prospect
by John Cornwell / June 19, 2015
Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment—a formal church document, released yesterday, in which he calls for action on climate change and pollution—has been greeted with enthusiasm by an impressive array of the “people of good will” to whom he addresses it.
But in the long run, the reception of the Pope’s pronouncements may tell us more about the state of the Catholic Church and of the papacy than about how to solve the degradation of the planet.
The document has been praised by the many secular institutions that blame the actions of humans for climate change. Representatives of the United Nations (UN) have enthusiastically endorsed it, as has Greenpeace—institutions that have no brief for Christianity, let alone Catholicism. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday noted that the encyclical expressed “a very solid scientific consensus” showing that most global warming in recent decades is “mainly a result of human activity.”
At the same time, though, there is a subterranean theme within the encyclical’s 184 pages that has prompted strong reactions inside the Catholic Church. It has been harshly criticised by some leading Catholics who believe that it goes beyond the papal remit by expressing uncompromising views on politics and economics.
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