Pope Francis faces challenge persuading US Catholic leaders on climate change.

[Act_of_Reparation]

Pope Francis faces challenge persuading US Catholic leaders on climate change
Guardian
9/16/2015

When the US supreme court legalised same-sex marriage in June, the leader of America’s Catholics erupted in white-hot fury, condemning the historic decision as “a tragic error”.

When a week or so earlier, it fell to Archbishop Joseph Kurtz as leader of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to deliver the official welcome to Pope Francis as he issued his sweeping indictment of the global economic order and its effects on the poor and the environment, the response was several degrees cooler.

Kurtz, while ostensibly endorsing the pope’s call to action, did not join the leader of his faith in condemning pollution as a sin. He did not echo the pope’s call for an urgent phasing out of fossil fuels. And Kurtz most definitely did not join the pope in attributing climate change largely to human activities, and calling out powerful vested interests for seeking to conceal the evidence of climate change. In fact, Kurtz did not mention climate change at all.

Activists from the Catholic church and other faith traditions are preparing a vast mobilisation around the pope’s visit this month culminating in a vigil and 24 September rally on Washington’s Mall where they are hoping to draw crowds of 300,000. But they described a disconnect between the enthusiasm of community groups and the patchy response from the church leadership. (More)

That amazing, groundbreaking, unarguably influential encyclic we've heard so much about? It doesn't look like America's bishops were particularly convinced.

Oh, it's not that they don't care about climate change. It's just that climate change isn't as important to them as denying women the right to choose and gays the right to marry. Priorities!

[Bluenorthwest]

1. And yet those are also priorities of Francis' and it is wrong to pretend otherwise.

Last November, Francis was the key note speaker at a three day international interfaith conference produced by the Vatican in Rome. The subject matter? Defending marriage against the gays. The Vatican invited guest list included Tony Perkins of FRC, Maggie Gallagher of NOM, Rick Warren, the heads of the LDS and Southern Baptists and representatives of the Heritage Foundation. Nothing at all about climate change, nothing about income inequality. Three days of this. Hundreds of them from around the world.

So sure, he's good on a couple of issues. That does not buy him out of his anti gay activism nor out of his anti choice activism. He has made those priorities as well, and it is not really fair to claim he has not. Because he has.