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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.
The pope is a leftist stooge trying to deflect from their sexual molesting scandal with science fiction now.
Sexual molesting causes global warming.
I had visited the Vatican in 2002. What I witnessed amazed me, not due to the Carrara marble of Michelangelo’s Pieta, nor the wondrous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I was taken aback by thousands (within their archives) likely millions of pieces of art that could singlely feed a poor nation for years if sold to museums, leased to them, or auctioned to highest bidder. As a practicing Catholic, I questioned this…what could one piece do for those who suffer. Yet, upon my return to the US, I was preached upon the value of helping the poor and how capitalism is greedy. Huh? Now climate change. Next, as our new Pope has stated, communism, is closer to the doctrine than greedy capitalism. I am now amazed further. To the Vatican, why not take in thousands of refugees yourselves, instead of lecturing us. I, like most people, am just trying to get by. Something is seriously wrong here.
This is a total bunch of nonsense. The Pope cannot force what are his personal opinions on new priests, present clerics or the Catholic faithful. It sounds as if WUWT has a problem with the truth.
The Pope has no power or authority to make his personal opinions an edict. He only has the authority to enforce the church’s doctrine.
Silly me.
I thought the mission of the church is salvation of souls.
When the church got into a rumble with Galileo over heliocentric vs. geocentric centuries ago how did that turn out? The church was WRONG!
God has created a wonderful world that self corrects. It doesn’t get too hot, and it doesn’t get too cold, but goes from hot to cold and back in rhythm. Who can doubt that we are protected by an all powerful God. How dare the pope contradict God. The pope is not Christian.
If they do I will walk out. Stick to the Bible.!
carbon emissions = EXHALING…………..this stuff has gone beyond all levels of reason.
No where in the instructions for seminarians is Global Warming even mentioned. This article is BS.
They could also go back to flat earth teaching. That worked out well!!
A false prophet intent on driving a knife into the back of the Church for political gain. Slow suicide at best, but it’s what the church wants. If it wasn’t, it would be stopped now. Preaching based on lies.
Would they be incensed having to use low-emission incense?
The Catholic Church is a dying organization that’s trying to throw anything against the wall to keep people in the pews, and it’s not working. This is just another attempt to do that. As a former Catholic I think this is actually positive.
I’ve been watching other denominations like Pentecostals convert Catholics left and right. As much as I disagree with some of what the Pentecostals believe, no one can ague with their love in Jesus Christ and his plan for our salvation. Contrast that with Catholic clergy, which is about 60-70% gay, including nuns, have serious emotional problems, and about half, deep down, don’t really believe, they’re just going through the motions. If the clergy is spiritually dead the parishioner is lost as well.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that as much as this clergy is pushing for women priests, they’ll never talk about married priests, because, in general, the majority gay clergy would feel uncomfortable around another priest who is in a loving, committed relationship, as they would be constantly reminded that they are unbalanced people, and they don’t want to be reminded of that.
I’m so happy that I left for a more nurturing, evangelical environment.
When they can explain how Eric The Red was farming and raising cattle in Greenland in 1000 AD, they will then get my attention!!!!!!
This Pope is a Globalist Socialist, bordering on Marxism. Global Warming advocacy is in his wheelhouse. No Catholic church has seen or will see one dime of this Catholic’s money until this Pope is long gone…
There are a lot of anti-religious folks here, but they need to understand that science and religion are not only compatible, but they are inseparable. That’s why so many great scientists have been deeply religious people.
However, religion frustrates and angers many of you for one main reason: the Truth of religion cannot be explained by science as we know it. So the nasty attitude toward religion is understandable, even if it’s clearly not excusable.
I’m saddened by a lot of the political nonsense coming out of the papacy these days, including this climate change farce. However, it does not negate any of the many great aspects of the Church. We’ll be around forever, and that’s a truth you’ll just have to accept.
So, God is not sovereign any longer?
“So, God is not sovereign any longer?”
God is still sovereign. It’s just that there are always a lot of mere mortals who presume to speak for God.
There are a lot of anti-religious folks here, but they need to understand that science and religion are not only compatible, but they are inseparable. That’s why so many great scientists have been deeply religious people.
However, religion frustrates and angers many of you for one main reason: the Truth of religion cannot be explained by science as we know it. So the nasty attitude toward religion is understandable, even if it’s clearly not excusable.
I’m saddened by a lot of the political nonsense coming out of the papacy these days, including this climate change farce. However, it does not negate any of the many great aspects of the Church. We’ll be around forever, and that’s a truth you’ll just have to accept.
Anti religion is one thing – anti Catholic is entirely another
Science and religion are definitely separable. And indeed should be.
The majority of the best scientists alive today are atheists. That wasn’t true in the 16th and 17th centuries, but became increasingly common in the 18th and 19th. In the 20th and 21st, it’s a majority of those making the greatest advances.
Even when great scientists were religious, they were often heretical, like Galileo and especially Newton, who was a secret Unitarian. Yet even in the 19th and early 20th century there were devout Catholic great scientists, such as Pasteur. But religion and science are definitely separable. One is based upon belief taken on faith and the other upon observation and doubt.
Sorry Roman Catholic church. My wife and family were thinking of leaving the catholic church when the pope decided to get into George Soros’ pocket. Sealed the deal. No more for us, or our money.
Don’t give Satan a win.
As I read it, it’s a wacko green Californian taking the Church’s boilerplate on the issue, and claiming something which the Church does not.
What a damning dictum for the theory. Consider the case of Galileo to ascertain how things fair when the Catholic church attempts to marry itself to science.
Tilting toward the left is damaging the Church and resulting in a loss of members not only in the Catholic Church but also in some protestant sects. Conservative congregations, on the other hand, are vigorous and growing.
The Pope is just doing what most lay people do by going with what seems to be the mainstream of science. In that he is doing the same thing Pope Paul V did with regard to Galileo; he went with the consensus of secular scientists who didn’t think Galileo had proved his case. The Pope has no special insight about the science or the truth of the natural world. He should just be regarded as yet another leftist pinhead who thinks he’s saving the world.
When the Pope and the Catholic Church finally walk back their “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” mantra, and instead begins preaching birth control and that those in poverty are NOT the ones who should be having children, then I’ll be OK with them telling priests to promote global warming.
Until then, they can stuff it—and is precisely why I’m a Protestant and will be for life.
The chairman of Pope Francis’ climate study commission, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, is a German climate activist from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research. He is also an avowed atheist and advocate for climate control.
The Pope can make infallible , binding decisions on matters of faith and morals only under certain conditions. Infallibility in the Catholic Church only applies to matters of faith and morals (the creed and the commandments) which bind the whole Church.
The Pope has clearly exceeded his Papal authority here by using religion to disguise his idealogical agenda.
The Roman Catholic Church also famously excommunicated Gallileo for daring to say the earth revolved around the sun. How strange that the Church wants to get back into the science business, considering its solid record on being on the wrong side of scientific history, again and again.
This global warming crap is getting out of hand. It’s just another way for the rich to take money from the poor and middle class.
Enough is enough! The people of this world are not buying your lies anymore!