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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.
Stick to salvation. And to the extent you want to influence politics, take the “hard road” and work to overturn abortion. Finally, if you insist on joining with the global warming crowd, than actually take on a project, such as the tons of junk mail that are produced, delivered and discarded every week. Junk mail has no “flash”, is not speech worthy, and won’t bring any standing ovations. But it is real and serves as a good test of your sincerity on the issue.
Only because of this pope and possibly his successors if he is allowed to appoint more and more liberal sodo mite cardinal electors. The infestation is complete.
Only a Blind man would not see what this Pope is up to . Francis believes that his Church has been nothing more than the prejudices and suspicious behaviors of small-minded rule followers who are only now becoming enlightened by the flow of history and cultural change to be led out of the tar pits of the past. He doesn’t really believe any of it in any fundamental way. These political pronouncements are in line with that leftist perspective.
The catholic church also imprisoned Galileo because he said the earth orbited the sun.
Coming from the Che Guevara Pope…..why the surprise?
Poor Francis. Now that God has left him, he will soon realize that at the place where he is going to now warmer is better is the motto. Get used to it, Francis. Hellzapoppin!
Gee, excommunication for climate scepticism? That could never happen! It’s not like the church was arguing that the sun revolves around the earth… Oh, right.
Good grief – Now Al Gore and his deluded minions have corrupted the Pope!
In 1917 at Fatima, the Blessed Mother told the children, “Priests should not busy themselves with anything except what concerns the Church and souls.”
God would have to be a fool to create a CO2 doomsday bomb. The AGW theory has no way for temperatures to stop increasing with an increase in CO2, it literally is a doomsday theory. Facts are, God isn’t a fool. That is why the IR absorption of CO2 is a logarithmic function. It has a natural off switch to prevent it from destroying life. The Catholic Church would be far better off explaining how God’s designed the system to prevent exactly what the climate alarming are claiming. The geologic record shows CO2 being as high as 7000ppm and we never had catastrophic warming. The Catholic Church is making a huge mistake.
I’d rather that the church order them to stop diddling little boys as well as each other.
Pope Francis is Obama with a beanie and is a socialist, as is Obama. This is a leftist tactic to push an agenda. The new priests should tell Frank to stuff it under his beanie. More perversion of Catholic theology.
Catholic Church is OK with me, but don’t miss
Nach römisch-katholischer Lehre ist der Papst der Stellvertreter Christi auf Erden und Nachfolger des Petrus. Die Unfehlbarkeit des Papstes bezieht sich nur auf dessen Definitionen in Glaubens- und Sittenfragen. Sie wurde unter Papst Pius IX. vom Ersten Vatikanischen Konzil 1870 verkündet.
“According to Roman Catholic doctrine the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth and successor of Peter. The infallibility of the pope refers only to its definitions in matters of faith and morality. It was under Pope Pius IX. From the First Vatican Council in 1870.”
The Popes infallibility doesn’t refer to politics or climate change.
Doesn’t biblical Revelations speak of a religious leader who allies with a political leader to bring about the “end of days”?! GK
No to the doesn’t because it does.
That would be the Beast and the false Prophet,…
A classic case of “misdirection” to avoid linking global warming with unfettered population growth and the Church’s role in it.
The alt-Pope is creating an alt-Church.
Another example of the false Pope. More interested in spreading human communism than the Word of God
What’s up with this pope! Long Live John Paul II!!!
The new pope, the MARXIST Pope Frances, is turning the Catholic Church into a cesspool. It’s bad enough that many of the Priests are PEDOPHILES, now they are about to join Al Gore in his “global warming” SCAM !!!! I was raised Catholic but stopped attending church way back in High School. To me, the Catholic Service was just SO boring. Since then, The Priest sex scandals, and now this global warming BS, and I have ZERO inclination to return to the church.
stop making lame excuses to stay away from the church. any church is a hospital for sinners.there are going to be corrupt people in any organization. maybe you could focus on the 99% of priests doing good work.
Are Catholics trying to take over the AlGorian religion now?
I’m a little suspicious of a Pope whose concern seems to be far more weighted to the created rather than the Creator. Paul warned us of such reprobates and how they were of their father, but I never thought I would live long enough to see it at the top.
Apparently the Church failed to learn their lesson after preaching about the flat Earth for a millennium, before being forced to acknowledge that objective reality trumps fictional dogma.
AC writes “forced to acknowledge that objective reality trumps fictional dogma.”
Perhaps you could describe this force and perhaps provide a link to this admission. I doubt it is written as you propose.
The Church didn’t teach a flat earth for a millennium. It taught an immobile, but spherical, earth at the center of the universe. For its first few hundred years, many Church Fathers were biblical flat-earthers, but from about AD 400 on, the Church adopted the geocentric model, but which a spherical earth.
I guess the Roman Catholics found clear justification for the “global warming” idea in the Bible, right next to the passages that clearly describe Purgatory, Limbo, the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, Marion intercession, auricular confession to priests, priestly celibacy, the papacy, papal indulgences, papal infallibility, plus a ton of other Catholic doctrine.
AC and EM,
Most of the items to which you refer are not Catholic “dogma”. Dogma is a better word. Neither is global warming. An actual example of Catholic dogma would be the divinity of Jesus Christ or the Trinity. Papal infallibility is only claimed on dogma. The apostles’ creed is a good place to start to understand actual church dogma. A better word to describe church beliefs. It does not change. Doctrine, or teachings do change with better understanding over time. Unfortunately, teachings, like global warming, are wrong from time to time and reflect the politics and human weaknesses of the times.
The Church has consistently denied scientific theories in favour of theological belief. Galileo, mentioned above, was one example, and Darwin’s theory of evolution is another. Unfortunately Creationism is today alive and well in America, with or without the sponsorship of the Catholic Church. The Global Warming agenda plays neatly into the concept of the sinfulness of man and the consequent need to self-flagellate.
They got Astronomy wrong, persecuting Galileo.
Now the Faux Communist pope is leading the church in another hoax. Shameful