VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) –– A leading Vatican cardinal has highlighted the current inversion of priorities at the Vatican, positing religion at the service of measures to tackle “climate change” in a recent address.
For many years, one of the central themes of Pope Francis’ has been issuing firm warnings about impending catastrophes if action is not taken on matters of the climate. Such arguments have been made regularly in his many meetings or messages to various international organizations, and of course featured heavily in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si.
A consistent message
A brief, non-exhaustive summary is perhaps useful.
In 2017, Pope Francis appeared in a film warning of the dangers of climate change, and later encouraged climate change activist Greta Thunberg to continue her alarmist campaign.
Francis also sent a message to the United Nations 2019 conference on climate change, demanding political action to prevent climate change, as well as trying to ensure that the poor in society would be protected from its alleged effects.
Prior to that, in his message for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, the Pope said, “We have caused a climate emergency that gravely threatens nature and life itself, including our own.”
In 2020 he delivered a TED talk in which he described the current global situation as “unsustainable,” and argued that there are less than 30 years to achieve the “race to a zero-carbon world.”
This rhetoric has only escalated in recent years, coming to somewhat of a culmination during the summer of 2022 when the Vatican announced that it was joining the pro-abortion Paris Climate Agreement. Some days later, Francis defended his signing of the Agreement as the Holy See “having generously shouldered its grave responsibilities” regarding the “care of creation.” He suggested that “a covenant between human beings and the environment” should underpin the pro-abortion Agreement.
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Pro-life and family advocates have continually expressed concern over the climate activism movement, as it is often aligned with pro-abortion and population control advocates and lobby groups. Others say much of climate activism is about garnering government grants and exerting statist power.
Yet Francis has not seemed to heed such warnings, and instead has continued to promote the message of dire consequences for the globe and humanity if the stringent measures of the climate change agenda are not fulfilled.
Indeed, his actions have inspired many. The Laudato Si Movement is a group born out of Francis’ environmental encyclical of the same name. It issues calls to divest from fossil fuels, and aims to “turn Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato Si into action for climate and ecological justice.”
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This “divestment” is to limit the “catastrophic impacts that could lead to the displacement of hundreds of millions of people” should the earth’s temperature rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius, a level that climate change activists argue could lead to a global crisis.
The Pope has himself established an ecological training center in the Papal residence of Castel Gandolfo. Traditionally the pope’s summer retreat, Francis has not used the Pontifical villa, and instead orchestrated the grounds to be used to train people in responding to the climate-based “[r]ecurring crises and alarms.”
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Earlier this year, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development (DPIHD) – led by Cardinal Michael Czerny S.J. – even partnered with a Swedish climate “sustainability” group to print half a million copies of a booklet to be sent to parishes across the globe. The text is on “climate change, biodiversity, water, food production, air pollution, sustainable consumption, and links between sustainability and social justice.”
Yet while the Pope continues to issue alarmist climate and global warming messages, his statements are not going unchallenged. The central anti-life themes of the climate agendas he promotes have already been noted, yet his support continues unabated.
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But he has also been corrected by scientists who say the “Pope is getting terrible advice from some exalted churchmen who are seriously deficient in scientific knowledge.” He has been accused of being under the U.N.’s influence, leading to a focus “on creation of UN-led global government control, redistribution of global wealth, and global population control as part of the true meaning of ‘sustainable development.’
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Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition and a former climate change alarmist, last year rebuffed the mainstream hysteria on the topic.
Climate science is “a very immature science,” Harris stated, echoing the book which dismantles the claims of thousands of articles about the climate crisis, showing that “there is no foundation” to the proposition.
“There are thousands of references here which talk about the fact that there is no foundation to the climate scam,” he said. “It’s all based on models that don’t work.”
And in the face of the relentless promotion of fear-based messages on the climate – which are not presented alongside supporting factual evidence but simply couched in often self-referential language – Francis has made such arguments a priority of his pontificate, almost above anything else.
Certainly, his regular statements about impending climate doom are more consistent and vocal than any pronouncements on the sanctity of life, the immoral nature of homosexual actions, the right of the Church to pronounce on and lead the way on moral issues, or the general crisis of faith.
In fact, examining his record, more often than not Francis undermines the Catholic teaching on all of these issues, while the seemingly sacrosanct issue of climate change remains his chief talking point.
Cardinal highlights Papal priorities
For some Catholics, such a Papal fixation on climate change messages – particularly when they are not proven to be factually correct or are fundamentally linked to pro-abortion policies – might seem odd.
The temptation, or even desire, might be to disregard the arguments found above as absurd. Yet just this week, a leading Vatican cardinal outlined succinctly the Pope’s ideology with regards to the relation between religion and climate and the priority of each.
Cardinal Czerny – raised by Francis to be the inaugural leader of the DPIHD – delivered a speech Monday to the 4th International Congress on the Care of Creation in Lisbon. He argued that “human activity causing greenhouse gas emissions is the cause of the excessive heat,” and that “what is being done is not enough and results are falling short of the target. So things will get worse.”
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Czerny also called for “fewer private cars” – a key World Economic Forum talking point – an immediate enacting of achieving net-zero, and green-oriented finance. He even echoed arguments claiming that the recent Canadian wildfires were due to climate issues, whilst evidence increasingly suggests they were due to deliberate arson.
In the midst of such claims, Czerny succinctly outlined the Papal thought on what priority should be given to faith in the face of such climate arguments. The answer appears to be that faith and religion are simply tools which can be used or cast aside in the service of promoting the climate change agenda of fear.
Drawing from Laudato Si, Czerny stated:
If we are truly concerned to develop an ecology capable of remedying the damage we have done, no branch of the sciences and no form of wisdom can be left out (Laudato Si 63). Respect must also extend to the religions and the cultural and spiritual riches of the many different peoples (Laudato Si 34). And we should be grateful to indigenous peoples for their courageous efforts to protect the earth (LS146)…Whether religious or not, we can agree today that the earth is a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone.