Posted on 12/30/2014 5:11:40 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Pope Francis continues his groundbreaking progressive approach to Catholicism with plans to expand next year on one of his favorite causes: climate change and protecting the environment. The pope is expected to make climate change a large part of his leadership efforts throughout 2015, according to ThinkProgress.org, using the papacy to encourage the 1.2 billion Catholics to protect the environment as “God’s creation.”
Pope Francis has even gone as far as to call the destruction of the rainforest a sin, and cautioned Catholics and non-Catholics alike that protecting the environment is a sacred matter, going as far as back as his inaugural mass in 2013.
“The vocation of being a ‘protector,’ however, is not just something involving us Christians alone; it also has a prior dimension which is simply human, involving everyone. It means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us. It means respecting each of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live.”
Under Pope Francis’ leadership in 2014, the Catholic Church held a five-day summit with scientists and experts on the environment, and the Pope already has plans in place to address the New York general assembly next September regarding climate change and general environmental issues. Pope Francis will also attend The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change global meeting in Paris at the end of 2015.
Taking further action related to the operations of the Catholic Church, the pope will be drafting a formal letter to all Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, called an encyclical, specifically addressing climate change.
Dan Misleh, director of the Catholic climate covenant, told The Guardian these letters are rare and uses Pope Francis’ highest level of authority in creating the document, expected to be somewhere around 50-60 pages long. But the pope can expect some push-back from other church members as well as evangelical groups and even member of Congress.
“There will always be 5-10 percent of people who will take offense,” Misleh told The Guardian. “They are very vocal and have political clout. This encyclical will threaten some people and bring joy to others. The arguments are around economics and science rather than morality.”
Pope Francis has distinguished himself from previous popes in his progressive views on such topics as evolution, homosexuality, and politics within the Vatican. These views, as well as the pope’s humility and his example of leading a far less lavish lifestyle than previous popes, have made him very popular among non-Catholics as well as members of his own church.
Do you agree with Pope Francis that harming the environment is a “sin?”
“Do you agree with Pope Francis that harming the environment is a “sin?””
Of course it’s not a sin. A man clearing a section of forest to get lumber to build a house and fields to grow food for his family is not a sinner.
However, if one has a bureaucracy to support, one needs to make it indispensable. I’m sure there will be great business if they can convince Catholic faithful to “check in” and get an opinion on this particular made-up sin - with a tax and permit fee to Rome to keep tabs on people who may be tempted to environmentally sin again.
I have an issue with following people who are not clearly striving the revealed road to union with God—which is most people most of the time, including myself.
The problem with following someone merely because we perceive them as “closer to the Bible” is that it is possible to be closer on some issues while simultaneously farther away on others, and it is fallen human nature to be attracted to those who proclaim the Bible as we understand it, which is often more a reflection of ourselves than of actual revelation.
Undoubtedly some Popes are better than others—not many from the past 1400 years have been canonized, and a few of the recent additions would still be waiting in line if Paul VI hadn’t lowered canonization standards. Still, even with the bad Popes, one born Catholic and at least somewhat educated is left fumbling with Peter at the end of John 6—where else are we to go, you have the words of everlasting life. Raising one’s own standard is attractive, but in the end, to quote Samuel “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” that is, seemingly trying to attain a good end by a means that is ultimately flawed, even if we cannot articulate the flaw beyond the fact that God doesn’t want us to do it this way.
A good line to hold on to comes from the closing chapter of the book The Gates of Hell by Anne Roche Muggeridge—”Don’t let the b*stards drive you out.
“In fact the New Testament is quite bold and says that Christ was in the cloud that Moses and the Hebrew people followed.”
And speaking of Moses, Hebrews declares Moses “...considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.”
I just love God’s Word!
In Greek, Christos, the term for the Hebrew Moshiach. It means anointed. The Savior was in Old Testament salvation as well as being in New Testament salvation. And we can thank the Lord for recording that fact in the book of Hebrews. Early Christendom openly spoke of them as unitary, identical. It only looks weird from a later chiefly-Gentile Christian perspective because we have separated the Jewish and “Christian” encounters with God into artificial airtight chambers. God smiles when He sees Christendom rediscovering its Hebrew roots.
One of Pope Francis’ advisers for his encyclical on the environment is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Jeffrey Sachs is a longtime promoter of environmental measures, especially contraception and abortion, for purposes of population control. He was invited to Rome to participate in the Holy See’s climate-change summit in late April.
Pope Francis made a very demeaning comment criticizing as rabbits the Catholic mothers that are blessed with many children. The mother of St Catherine de Sienna gave birth to 22 children. St Ignatius was the youngest of 13 children. How many more future Saints would be denied to live by Pope Francis’ birth control policy emulating Mao’.
Another adviser called by Francis is Leonardo Boff, one of the main leaders of the Marxist libration theology whose works were condemned by His Holiness John Paul II for the perversion of the Gospels with the inclusion of the main tenets of the Marxist ideology and was punished to silence for a year.
Speaking to Le Monde, days before of his recall to Rome, and previous to the definitive condemnation of his book, a defiant Boff affirmed that he “does not abjure for anything of the historical materialism.” Boff invoked Gramsci and Althusser. Gramsci was the communist theoretician of the seizure of power in developed societies. Althusser undertook the intellectualization of Stalinism. Boff said that “Is the poor who have hegemony, not the Church.”
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