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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Catholic Online reports that new priests will be expected to be familiar with and promote efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
New priests to learn about global warming as part of formation
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LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) — The Catholic Church is intimately concerned about climate change. The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences is the world’s oldest, longest running scientific mission. That body, which advises the pope on matters of science, has concluded that global climate change is real and is caused, at least in significant part, by human activity.
This is important to the Church because creation care is part of our mission. We are called to be stewards of creation. It’s also important because climate change can exacerbate the ills of poverty. Poor people in much of the world are the most vulnerable to changes.
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Unfortunately, the issue is politicized. In the late 1970s, when the issue threatened the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry, the political lobbies, chiefly in the United States, financed a massive political disinformation campaign to manufacture the illusion of dissent within the scientific community.
We know because this manipulation of public opinion has been caught and documented. The fossil fuel industry funds nearly all of the climate change skeptics, going so far as to commission questionable studies, to financing think tanks, and even paying individual bloggers. The deception continues today.
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But what does this have to do with the Church?
The Church has a responsibility to care for people, and the environment. And care for one is also care for the other.
Now updated guidelines for the formation of clergy says new priests should understand this as well:
“Protecting the environment and caring for our common home — the Earth, belong fully to the Christian outlook on man and reality. Priests should be “promoters of an appropriate care for everything connected to the protection of creation.”
The new guidelines suggest that in the future, priests will also have a good grasp of the global climate change problem and will share this with their congregation.
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Read more: http://www.catholic.org/news/green/story.php?id=72433
From the Vatican website;
The Gift of the Priestly Vocation
… For some time now, experts and researchers, active in different fields of study, have turned their attention to the emerging planetary crisis, which is reflected strongly in the current Magisterium regarding the ‘ecological question’. Protecting the environment and caring for our common home – the Earth – belong fully to the Christian outlook on man and reality. They constitute in some way the basis for a sound ecology of human relations. Hence they demand, today above all, a “profound interior conversion. It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and thus become inconsistent. So what they all need is an ‘ecological conversion’, whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evidence in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience. Therefore it will be necessary for future priests to be highly sensitive to this theme and, through the requisite Magisterial and theological guidance, helped to “acknowledge the appeal, immensity and urgency of the challenge we face”. This must then be applied to their future priestly ministry, making them promoters of an appropriate care for everything connected to the protection of creation. …
Whats next? Excommunication of scientists whose theories aren’t approved by the Pope?
Update (EW) – Added a quote from “The Gift of the Priestly Vocation” from the Vatican website.
Umm, the Apostolic Church might want to examine which exacerbates more the plight of the poor– net cold or net warmth. Also, please consider the science undergirding this policy, and how IT was fraudulently manipulated by the likes of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University.
This is why after 60 years I am leaving/have left the Catholic Church.
Read the document from the Vatican! Of course it says no such thing. This story is simply not true. Priests are not “required to preach gobal warming”! Please inform yourself from the sources. The Church does not teach anything that’s stupid. Christ taught nothing that’s stupid. You should know better, but at least it’s not too late for you. God bless.
Go to the Green Party’s web site….a controlling socialist organization. It’s all about controlling how you live, where you live and paying for it through carbon taxes. Do your research….it’s all nonsense.
Exactly right!…… U.N. official Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III, admitted what’s behind the climate issue: “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the worlds wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
Note: Just wondering if Pope Francis will be redistributing the Vatican’s wealth?
Nuts on steroids or maybe opioids
What happened to the 17,000 victims of sex abuse in the church? This is more urgent than preaching protection of the creation. How about protection of children from bad priests?
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/AtAGlance/data.htm
Dr. Strangelove writes “What happened to the 17,000 victims of sex abuse in the church?”
Perhaps they were subjected to strange love.
“How about protection of children from bad priests?”
I do not understand “how about” questions.
There was a time when the Catholic church was a religious organization not a liberal, political one. I walked away from the oppressive atmosphere years ago.
As a lifelong Catholic, this communist pope is the last straw. I can no longer consider the Church to be any part of my life. John Paul II was the last pope I respected although Benedict wasn’t a communist, he wasn’t even close to the man Karol Wojtyla was even before he became Pope John Paul II. Francis is a tool of the leftists and is causing a mass exodus of lifelong Catholics such as myself because we are not interested in becoming “progressive”. Global warming is the biggest fraud ever and has been used as a club to rob the American middle class and enrich the cronies of the political class. It’s nothing but a tool to rob American taxpayers blind. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GLOBAL WARMING. Period.
Blasphemy!
Take this report with a large grain of salt. Any statement by the church instantly exposes hatred (see the replies) which are essentially unrelated to the topic.
Priests are taught, down in their blood, to care for people; it is the basic command of their God. They know nothing about climatology (except perhaps one or two scientists. The Pope taught Chemistry, he maybe one.) He has ordered his shepherds to get smarter on the scientific conflict. With the change in US Presidents and Congress, we all will learn more.
But the basic command, love one another stands rock hard, for Trump, the Pope, every priest and each person on earth.
I just don’t get it. What does the Catholic Church want to accomplish? Will the Bingo money go to developing alternative fuels? What is the objective? People should welcome higher costs and taxes? People should turn to the Government, not the Church for salvation? Just what is the objective?
Well, I see the anti-Catholic bigots are out in force. While you are counting dead bodies,
you have forgotten the SIXTY FIVE MILLION BABIES THAT HAVE BEEN MURDERED BY YOU “PRO CHOICE” BUTCHERS SINCE ROE V WADE!
Popes generally claim divine guidance. Maybe so. But THIS Pope gets his guidance from communists.
The Catholic Church is known to be the Mother Church to all Christian Churches by its own. The Bible calls it the Mother of Harlot’s, Harlot’s being all the other churches that sprang out of it over the decades.
Christ told them to preach the Gospel. The ” Good News” of salvation, not worshipping the Creation or “creature” which is what they are doing. He also told believers/followers to take nothing but the cloths on their back in service to Christ. Catholic Church lives in luxury having no need or want.
The Catholic Church is far removed from the mission, as seen upon visiting the USA, and taking no issue with the depravity/sin coming out of the Obama administration virtually condoning abomination.
Fortunately, we individually can rest in the peace that is in Christ, that God knows what He is going by allowing these things, free will, so in the end, at Judgement, no one will be excused and all will be held appropriately acountable.
God bless.
Dominus go friskum…..
frisk-’em?
The Church and science don’t have a great history- it took them 350 years to admit they were wrong and apologize for condemning the scientist Galileo for his theory the the earth was not the center of the universe. 99% of scientists thought the earth was the center of the universe and the Church considered it heresy to suggest otherwise. I am with the 1% that think it’s the sun, not man that impacts climate and there are a few predicting a period of cooling- winter is coming! We are entering a minimum that will peak in 2030
In other posts about the Pope and Laudato si encylical, the excuses from defenders flowed along the lines that it was just an opinion and not much more. Now what is the excuse?
Oh, we’re in big trouble now, because when God signs off on it, then that’s the end of the story. Just add another book to the Bible — call it The Book Of Carbon. Climatology, thus, securely establishes itself as a subdivision of theology.
Please study The Book of Revelation and you will know exactly who the Vatican really is: The whore of Babylon.
Okay, let’s start with the donation of all Catholic owned property to the Green Party and conservation causes. Let’s see how that works out before moving to step two.
The linked article is not a reliable news piece. The church document says nothing specific that i could find about agw.I’m not going to read all 91 pages, but from what i did read, it seems to take only the very uncontroversial position that caring for the environment is a moral obligation and, as such, proper for instruction. The writer, however, misleads readers by claiming that the document “suggests” priests spread the dogma of global warming. In fact, that is only the writer’s inference–unsurpassedly, since activists universally mistake their opinions for facts.
Unsurprisingly
The Church should steer well clear of scientific pronouncements. As I said in a comment to the original story, “If your aim is to cast doubt on the Church’s mission and undermine its moral authority, by all means, drag it into the materialistic arena of scientific disputes, where compassion is an artifact of natural selection and faith is for fools. Anyone who does not understand that has no business questioning the motives of skeptics.”
New World Order Pope doing all he can to scare the $h!t out of what few sheep the Child Rapists Church has left!!!
Burn in hell, you Church of Evil!!!!!
Not surprising, the heyday of the Catholic Church was Medieval times.
So much misinformation and slander against the Catholic Church above…most coming from people who should know better. Suffice it to say the enemies of the Church will always latch onto some tidbit or another, whether based in truth or not, to wield as a weapon against the Church. Well, you will find it a sad day when at the end you come to find out it was Jesus Christ Himself you were attacking.
The Church is holy because Jesus Christ is holy, not because sinners cling to Him for salvation. It is said even a saint falls seven times a day, meaning even they, at some level, still have the effects of the seven deadly sins in them. Everyone on this earth from the pope on down to the most earnest saint, is beset by sin, evil inclinations, and concupiscence of the flesh. It would behoove you all to come down out of the tree and acknowledge only Jesus Christ is holy, none of you are.
And yet the RCC calls itself christian while denying Biblical Justification? i think you need to read the RCC Council of Trent Canons to see this….
CANON 9: “If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema.”
“Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” (Rom. 5:1).
Good to see we got plenty of 400 year old anti-catholic propaganda in this thread. How about we look at what REALLY happened:
Galileo had to do only ONE thing if he wanted to teach heliocentrisim as a fact: Prove it was true.
I bet the peddlers of that myth didn’t tell you all that, did they?
In his day there were two SCIENTIFIC objections that were fatal to heliocentrisim.
1. If the earth is moving, why don’t we feel it moving?
Newtonian physics, which answered that objection, wouldn’t be around for another 50 years. There was no satisfactory answer in Galileo’s day.
2. If the Earth moves around the sun, we should observe stellar parallax. How do you account for the lack of this observed stellar parallax?
Stellar parallax wasn’t successfully observed until the 19th century. Nobody then had any reason to believe the universe was as big as we now know it to be.
Galileo could answer neither of these objections. Objections raised by his fellow scientists.
Want to know what Galileo thought was his BEST evidence? The tides, because the earth going around the sun caused all the water in the oceans to slosh around. (Yes, really.)
So Galileo not only couldn’t prove heliocentrisim, he then goes and insults the Pope in print for siding with the science of the day. (Go look up “Galileo and Simplico”.)
Now the Pope at the time was not only personal friends with Galileo, Galileo’s research and teaching was funded by the church. Did they come down on him a bit hard? Probably. That happens though when you backstab your biggest allies while peddling unproven theories as facts.
Threaten an old man with torture until he recants and put him under house arrest for the rest of his life have nothing to do with scientific inquiry. People who condone these acts in the name of science are sadistic and have no sense of human rights.
Dr. Strangelove says “… and have no sense of human rights.”
Agreed. Human rights, whatever exactly that is, is a fairly recent invention. I doubt it existed in the 1600’s.
I also doubt you could define them.
Roughly speaking human rights is the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. The term “human rights” is relatively new but the concept is ancient and certainly known in the 1600s. The laws of ancient civilizations recognized these rights at least for free citizens. Murder, assault, stealing were considered crimes because they violate these rights.
It is bizarre that anybody would interpret the conclusion of a scientific research (right or wrong) as an insult to the pope. Unless he/she believes the pope is infallible and every word he utters is eternally true and any expression of dissent is a mortal sin that must be punished severely. I’m sure Galileo was right and the pope wrong but I’m not sure if this is the teaching of the church or an abuse of authority by the pope.
To answer the science part of history:
“Newtonian physics, which answered that objection, wouldn’t be around for another 50 years. There was no satisfactory answer in Galileo’s day.”
Wrong. Newtonian mechanics is based on the motion experiments of Galileo. Newton generalized Galileo’s discoveries. Newton’s law of inertia was known to Galileo and Newton’s law of acceleration was a generalization of Galileo’s law of falling bodies. Galileo could answer their objection but the theologians were not satisfied with his answer.
“Stellar parallax wasn’t successfully observed until the 19th century… So Galileo couldn’t prove heliocentrism”
If that was really the objection, how come heliocentrism was accepted in the 17th century at the time of Newton? Truth is Galileo need not prove heliocentrism because Kepler already proved it with Kepler’s laws of planetary motion published 14 years before Galileo was sentenced by the Inquisition in 1633.
What a lot of bigotry has been unleashed. Did you not notice the editorialising in this so called report?