Yesterday, July 7, Pope Benedict released his much-awaited encyclical on the economy. As anticipated, it was filled with commentary about poverty, social responsibility, and, of course, abortion. However, nestled in the encyclical’s 144 pages was an admonition that “the environment is God's gift to everyone” and must not be squandered.
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When one thinks of the hot-button issues facing Catholicism, the environment probably doesn’t top the list. However, last year Pope Benedict listed pollution as one of seven “social” sins, and his attention appears to be turned to the earth as well as the heavens. Certainly much of Benedict’s recent encyclical is theoretical in scope, and it’s dubious if the pope can affect real economic change. But we can all find inspiration in the Vatican’s concrete efforts in the area of renewable energy. Who knows? While Benedict’s encyclical may fail to fix the global economic crisis, it may just motivate the faithful to purchase energy-efficient light bulbs.
Lightbulbs? God help us! The Pontif's greatest work would be to make the world hate abortion and divorce as much as climate change.
I'm sure God does.
Catholic Cardinal: Global Warming Hysteria a ‘New Religion’
A cardinal in the Catholic Church says the hysteria over man-made climate change is akin to a “new religion” and a symptom of “pagan emptiness.”
Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia, has been the target of criticism in his country for expressing doubts about the validity of man-made global warming.
In an interview that appeared in The Catholic World Report, he said: “Right now, the mass media, politicians, many church figures, and the public generally seem to have embraced even the wilder claims about man-made climate change as if they constituted a new religion.
“These days, for any public figure to question the basis of what amounts to green fundamentalist faith is tantamount to heresy.”
Cardinal Pell called long-term weather forecasting “notoriously imprecise,” and pointed to predictions in the 1970s that the planet was about to enter a new ice age because of global cooling.
He said some of the more “hysterical and extreme” claims about impending climate change “appear symptomatic of a pagan emptiness, of a Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature…
“It’s almost as though people without religion, who don’t belong to any of the great religious traditions, have got to be frightened of something. Perhaps they’re looking for a cause that is almost a substitute for religion.”
As for Al Gore’s message of doom about climate change, Cardinal Pell noted that there are “significant errors” in his film “An Inconvenient Truth,” and added: “Few of us have the scientific knowledge to question the wild claims Gore has made — other than some grains of common sense.”
everyone should take care environments
thanks