Just before the one-year anniversary of the signing of the Paris agreement to combat climate change, Pope France gave a speech on one of the core principles of his Papacy to the members of the Pontifical Academy of Science (PAS), including notables such as Stephen Hawking and Werner Arber, Nobel laureate, and the first Protestant president of the PAS. The Pope denounced the “distractions” of profit and war in keeping politicians from implementing the agreement.
Pope Francis had pressed hard globally for the agreement leading up to the Climate conference in Paris. He had also published an encyclical called “Laudato Si,” which is considered by many observers as the tipping point in getting the nations to agree to curb global warming by cutting back on carbon emissions and other measures in Paris, a powerful measure of papal influence.
The pope reproved global politicians and denounced “the subjection of politics to a technology and an economy which seek profit above all else, which he said was distracting politicians from implementing the agreement. “Continued wars of domination camouflaged by righteous claims,” Francis told the group, “inflict ever greater harm on the environment and the moral and cultural richness of peoples.”
“Modern men and women have ‘grown up thinking ourselves owners and masters of nature,’” said pope Francis, “with the right to plunder it ‘without any consideration of its hidden potential and laws of development, as if subjecting inanimate matter to our whims.’ This mentality has led to many ills,” he said, including “a grave loss to biodiversity.”
Francis lamented “the ease with which well-founded scientific opinion about the state of our planet is disregarded” by international politicians. “We are not custodians of a museum or of its major artifacts to be dusted each day, but rather co-operators in protecting and developing the life and biodiversity of the planet and of human life present there,” the pope said to the room full of scientists.
In a mild reproof to Donald Trump, who vowed to pull the United States out of the agreement, and calling for more globalism to protect the planet, Francis said it was “essential to create a system that ensures the protection of ecosystems before ‘new forms of power…’ cause ‘irreversible harm not only to the environment, but also to our societies, to democracy, to justice and freedom.’” Collaboration between the United States and the Vatican remains key to papal success in achieving an implementing the agreement. The pope’s comments come at a strategic time for the Paris agreement.
Denouncing the usual suspects, he told the PAS members that the ecological conversion he wants to bring about includes “both the full assuming of our human responsibilities regarding creation and its resources, as well as the search for social justice and the overcoming of an immoral system that produces misery, inequality and exclusion.”
The goal of the Paris agreement, signed last December by 195 nations during the COP21 summit is to cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half. Scientists believe this is necessary to prevent devastating consequences to the environment.
The global climate agreement involves “protection of creation” and “Sunday rest.” It is part of the process of getting the world ready to receive the Papacy as the moral guide of the planet.
“And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.” Revelation 13:2, 3.