Roman Catholic pontiff Pope Francis has quietly embraced human-engineered climate change in a series of studies and announcements, culminating in a new papal order last week that makes it a mandatory subject for all priests in seminary.
In a statement that was little noticed by the establishment media — but heralded by a prominent Catholic website over the weekend — the pontiff issued “new guidelines” for educating priests: while “reaffirming the requirement that seminarians study Catholic social teaching, the document says the education must include a study of climate change and other environmental threats.”
The church officially accepts climate change and commissioned a study by the Vatican’s own Pontifical Academy of Sciences that stated: “We call on all people and nations to recognize the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic [human-caused] emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses.”
Pope Francis has continued to confirm the church’s position, which includes full support for the Paris Climate Agreement, which he describes as “urgently needed.”
At least one online Catholic webzine — that claims a daily readership of 100,000 — is proclaiming its enthusiasm for the new guidelines for priests while accusing the fossil fuel industry of financing a “disinformation” campaign to promote skepticism of global warming.
Catholic Online, accused by its detractors of “carelessness” concerning the church, is also described as “one of the largest Catholic internet operations in the world.”
In a weekend article, the webzine claims that “climate change is costing lives already, and will continue to cost more lives in the future,” suggesting that “unfortunately, the issue is politicized. In the late 1970s, when the issue threatened the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry, the political lobbies, chiefly in the United States, financed a massive political disinformation campaign to manufacture the illusion of dissent within the scientific community.”