Pope Francis to promote climate action as moral imperative

Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY 5:52 p.m. EDT April 22, 2015

As the world celebrates Earth Day on Wednesday, Pope Francis is planning to use one of the highest forms of papal expression — an encyclical — to promote climate action to save the planet as a moral and religious imperative.

In recent weeks, Vatican officials have outlined what the document will say and are choreographing its release — perhaps as early as June — for maximum global impact beyond the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.2 billion members.

Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, who chairs a panel dealing with environmental issues for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the encyclical has “gone to the translators, so it’s at the end of its birthing process.”

First on the promotional agenda is an April 28 Vatican conference where United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon will be a keynote speaker. The goal is to advance the morality argument that is a theme of the encyclical.

Then on successive days beginning Sept. 23, the pope will visit the White House, address a joint session of Congress — the first pontiff to do so — and address the U.N. General Assembly at the beginning of a summit on sustainable development.

“The timing of the encyclical is significant, "Cardinal Peter Turkson told a university audience in Ireland last month. “2015 is a critical year for humanity. … The coming 10 months are crucial.”

The Ghanian cardinal, who heads the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and who helped draft the encyclical, said all events lead to Paris in December, when nations will gather to debate how to slow or reduce global warming. He described the core message of the encyclical as “human ecology,” arguing that global economic inequality — a theme Francis has frequently raised — is inextricably linked to climate change.

The encyclical will urge that saving the environment is saving humanity, particularly the poorest, who are disproportionately impacted by global warming, Turkson said.

Francis hopes the document will “shape the discussion in Paris,” Wenski said.

Climate change activists are ecstatic. “He, along with the Dali Lama and a few rock stars, are the most popular people on the planet right now,” said Mary Evelyn Tucker, director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University. “He has moral authority and efficacy.”

Skeptics are apprehensive. Pope Francis has fallen into “apocalyptic alarmism,” Maureen Mullarkey wrote in the conservative Catholic publication First Things in January. He is, she said, “bending theology to premature (and) intemperate policy endorsements.”

Climate scientists frustrated that their warnings are not stirring appropriate public concern about dangers to the planet see the encyclical, which will be passed down through Catholic university teaching and parish ministries, as achieving greater penetration than ever in raising awareness. “I think it has the potential to be seismic,” said Thomas Lovejoy, professor in the environmental science and policy department atGeorge Mason University.

The document will land as a record number of Catholics declare or consider presidential runs for 2016:Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio,Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie and Rick Santorum, all whom either disagree with Francis’ views in part or entirely.

The White House, which supports steps to combat global warming, praised the pope’s stance. White House spokesman Frank Benenati said last week that “we welcome the pope’s attention and immeasurable influence to this global issue.”

Francis will “be a voice on this issue, which will … take into account the science,” said Wenski. “But he’ll be a voice of a pastor, a voice that will talk about the poor having first claim on our conscience in matters pertaining to the common good and (how) policies made about climate change will affect the common good.”

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Taken from: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/04/22/pope-francis-environment-encyclical-climate-change-moral/25870847/

Pope Francis: Gender theory is the problem, not the solution

Carol Glatz Catholic News Service  |  Apr. 15, 2015




Vatican City
   

Eradicating male and female identities does nothing to solve the problem of unfair or disrespectful treatment based on people's gender, Pope Francis said.
"Getting rid of the difference is the problem, not the solution," he said Wednesday during his general audience in St. Peter's Square.
The right way to solve the problems and conflicts in male-female relations is to have men and women "talk to each other more, listen to each other more, know each other better, care more for each other," he said.
The pope continued a series of general audience talks about the family by beginning the first of two talks on "the difference and complementarity between men and women." He said the two talks would serve as the foundation for two later talks dedicated to the sacrament of marriage.
At the end of the audience, Pope Francis personally greeted the husband and a daughter of Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian woman sentenced to death in 2010 under Pakistan's controversial laws against blaspheming Islam. Bibi's family came to Rome as part of a campaign to rally international support for her release.

In his main audience talk, Pope Francis said when God created humanity in his image, he did so for man and woman together, "as a couple," in a state of sharing and harmony.
Sexual differentiation, therefore, exists not for creating conflict or a situation of subordination, but for reciprocity and fruitfulness -- "for communion and generation, always in the image and likeness of God," the pope said.
"We are made to listen to each other and help each other," he said. "We can say that without mutual enrichment in this relationship -- in thinking and action, in feelings and work, even in faith -- the two can't even understand fully what it means to be a man and woman."
Modern culture has done much to open up a new and deeper understanding of men and women, "but it also has introduced many doubts and much skepticism," he said.
"For example, I wonder if so-called gender theory may not also be an expression of frustration and resignation that aims to erase sexual differentiation because it no longer knows how to come to terms with it," the pope said.
With gender theory, which argues that male and female characteristics are largely malleable social constructs, he said, "we risk going backward."
"God entrusted the earth to the covenant between man and woman: its failure drains the world of affection and obscures the heavens of hope," he said.
There are many "worrying" signs of the failure to live out God's original plan of reciprocity and harmony, he said, as he pointed out two things that "I think we have to commit ourselves to with greater urgency."
"The first: It is beyond question that we have to do much more in favor of women," such as making sure "that women not only are listened to more, but that their voice carries real weight, [is] an acknowledge authority in society and the church," he said to applause.
A powerful guiding light, the pope said, is "the way in which Jesus considered women," especially in a social and historical context that was much "less favorable than ours" and in which women "were really in second place."
Humanity has gone only "a tiny way" along the path God wants everyone to take, he said.
"We still have not grasped fully the things that the feminine genius can give us, what society and we can be given by women who know how to see things with another pair of eyes that complement men's ideas. It is a path to take with more creativity and audacity," he said to more applause.
The second thing that needs urgent attention, the pope said, is to see "if the collective crisis of faith in God, which is very harmful to us -- afflicting us with resignation, skepticism and cynicism -- may not be linked to this crisis of the covenant between men and women."
In fact, it is said that "communion with God is reflected in the communion of the human couple and that the loss of faith in the heavenly Father generates division and conflict between men and women."
Pope Francis said the church and all Catholics carry a great responsibility in "rediscovering the beauty of the Creator's plan."
Men and women "must treat each other with respect and friendly cooperation," and once this proper basis is created with God's grace, solid marriages and families can be built, he said.
"I would like to urge intellectuals to not abandon this subject, as if it had become secondary to the task of promoting a freer and more just society," he said.

....


Taken from: http://ncronline.org/blogs/francis-chronicles/pope-francis-gender-theory-problem-not-solution

Pope Francis’ Latest Mission: Stopping Nuclear Weapons

Elizabeth Dias @elizabethjdias 12:00 PM ET

The U.S. State Department is revving up its efforts to work with the Holy See

The Vatican has long opposed nuclear weapons, but Pope Francis is making the cause one of the top diplomatic priorities of his two-year-old papacy.

In December, the Vatican submitted a paper calling for total nuclear disarmament to the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. In January, Pope Francis touted nuclear disarmament as a major goal alongside climate change in his speech to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps. And on Easter Sunday, he publicly prayed that the prospective multi-nation deal to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program would be “a definitive step toward a more secure and fraternal world.”

Many observers expect the Pope to raise the topic in his speech to the United Nations in September, especially as that event also commemorates the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s historic U.N. speech calling for “never again war, never again war.”

“Pope Francis has recently pushed the moral argument against nuclear weapons to a new level, not only against their use but also against their possession,” Archbishop Bernedito Auza, the Holy See’s Ambassador to the U.N., says. “Today there is no more argument, not even the argument of deterrence used during the Cold War, that could ‘minimally morally justify’ the possession of nuclear weapons. The ‘peace of a sort’ that is supposed to justify nuclear deterrence is specious and illusory.”


The Vatican push on nuclear weapons comes as the United States is in the final stages of negotiating a deal with Iran and as 190 parties that have supported the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty prepare for its five-year review. The upcoming NPT RevCon, as the U.N. treaty review conference is called, is the first NPT review during the Francis papacy, and Francis’ voice is already adding moral and political weight to the conversation. The Holy See, a party to the Treaty, has opposed the possession and use of nuclear weapons since the beginning of the nuclear age.
The Holy See is “very concerned,” Auza adds, about nuclear-capable states’ commitment to disarmament, arguing that the central promise of the treaty remains unfulfilled. “The fact that nuclear-possessing States not only have not dismantled their nuclear arsenals but are modernizing them lies at the heart of nuclear proliferation,” he says. “It perpetuates the ‘injustice’ in the NPT regime, which was supposed to be temporary while nuclear disarmament was in progress…. how could we reasonably convince the pre-NPT non-nuclear countries not to acquire or develop nuclear arms capabilities? Now, the real and present danger that non-state actors, like terrorist and extremist organizations, could acquire nuclear weapons ‘in the black market’ and ‘not-so-black market,’ ‘in the back alleys’ and ‘not-so-back alleys’ should terrify us all.”
On Thursday, two events on opposite sides of the planet signaled Pope Francis’ diplomatic reach ahead of the NPT review. In New York at the United Nations’ headquarters, the Holy See’s Mission to the U.N. and the Global Security Institute hosted a conference of diplomats and interfaith partners to promote the abolition of nuclear weapons. At the Vatican, a United States diplomatic delegation was courting Catholic Church leaders on President Obama’s commitment to nuclear disarmament.
Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller has picked up on the Vatican’s keen interest in nuclear disarmament and has made it a priority to engage the Holy See. Gottemoeller first visited the Vatican in January to discuss arms control and nonproliferation issues with several counterparts. In late March, the State Department invited the Holy See to participate as an observer in its new disarmament verification initiative, the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification. This week, Gottemoeller returned to the Vatican with Madelyn Creedon, the Department of Energy’s principal deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration, for a two-day diplomatic visit.
Gottemoeller’s efforts have centered on briefing the Vatican on the United States’ disarmament agenda. She has been working to reach highest-level counterparts, as well as technical experts and non-governmental experts. “President Obama from the very beginning of his term in office has been very clear that his goal is to proceed with nuclear disarmament,” she says. “People think sometimes that that is just a kind of propaganda slogan out there without a lot of ‘there’ there, so I wanted to make sure that our Vatican counterparts knew the degree to which the President’s Prague initiative has become substantively a very significant part of our national policy.”

The United States knows the political capital Pope Francis holds when it comes to national and international decision-making. Most notably, the White House credited Francis for his role in brokering the U.S.-Cuba deal in December. “I think there is a huge moral impact of the Vatican on issues that relate to nuclear weapons deterrence and the disarmament agenda overall,” Gottemoeller says. “I see it is as a confluence of interest in a very positive sense. … You can’t just wave a magic wand and make nuclear weapons go away. It takes hard work and it takes a lot of very practical steps, but we can get there, and that is the President’s message. I just hope that we will be met by patience from the community trying to work on these issues.”
For Francis, nuclear disarmament—like most everything—must be viewed from the position of the poor instead of the position of the powerful. Inequality and nuclear power are interwoven. “Spending on nuclear weapons squanders the wealth of nations,” Pope Francis wrote to the Vienna Humanitarian Conference in December. “To prioritize such spending is a mistake and a misallocation of resources which would be far better invested in the areas of integral human development, education, health and the fight against extreme poverty. When these resources are squandered, the poor and the weak living on the margins of society pay the price.”
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has also been deepening its theological and political attention to disarmament. Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces, New Mexico, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on International Justice and Peace, spoke at the Holy See’s U.N. panel. During the NPT RevCon, the USCCB plans to sponsor an event with the Kroc Institute on evolving Catholic perspectives from nuclear deterrence to disarmament. Stephen Colecchi, director of the USCCB’s Office of International Justice and Peace, says that the USCCB is trying to move the Holy See’s moral discussion forward in the U.S.—the USCCB had a close relationship with the Administration during the time of the New START Treaty, and has continued the dialogue with Gottemoeller, who is Catholic. “We certainly urge the United States to work with Russia and we have been urging them to separate the issue of the day, which is Ukraine, from the issue of the decades, which is nuclear disarmament,” Colecchi says. “Deterrence is even less stable in a multipolar world. We might ask, Are nations, including our own, serious about nuclear disarmament if they are modernizing nuclear weapons systems?”
After a period of denuclearization in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, several states in the developing world went nuclear and events recently have further undermined the NPT. U.N. Ambassador Libran Cabactulan of the Philippines—who was the president of the previous NPT RevCon—flew in from Manila to speak at the Holy See’s event at the U.N. on Thursday. “Nothing has been achieved. Nothing much,” Cabactulan told the U.N. gathering, describing the progress of disarmament in the last five years. “What perhaps I achieved, that was calling more on temporal power, and maybe I failed, because in the order of things it’s the tally sheet, what has been done. And that is why I am gratified…to have spiritual leaders.”
Ambassador Antonio Patriota, permanent representative of Brazil to the United Nations, believes that Francis’ position will resonate during the NPT review conference. “He himself coming from South America, we feel that he has a very deep understanding of the challenges posed by inequality,” Patriota says. “His words carry quite a bit of political weight. It is a powerful message from man of high moral standing in a time when leadership is scarce.”


....


Taken from: http://time.com/3817021/pope-francis-nuclear-disarmament/

Pope Francis: “If we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us.”

President Barack Obama meets with Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2014. The pope visits the United States later this year to address climate change.

Here’s a sneak peak of Pope Francis’s historic “Climate Change Encyclical,” soon to be released, complete with talking points for his upcoming address to the joint session of Congress. We’ll analyze them:

The encyclical’s likely headline: “Safeguard Creation … We are the custodians of Creation … If we destroy Creation … Creation will destroy us,” a public warning often repeated by the pontiff this past year, a message certain to intensify the anger of GOP climate-science deniers, Big Oil, Koch Bros, Exxon Mobil and most fossil-fuel firms, as well as their banks, investors owning their stocks and capitalists everywhere. Here’s why:

Pope Francis’s much-anticipated encyclical will be broadcast worldwide to billions, including 5,000 bishops, 400,000 priests and 1.2 billion members of the Roman Catholic Church. He will be encouraging his army of the faithful to take strong action, fight climate change and global warming threats to the environment.

The encyclical will also be translated into hundreds of languages and broadcast worldwide. At the same time, Pope Francis will be lobbying heads of state and religious leaders, and inspiring billions of people worldwide, encouraging them to join this revolution.

This historic encyclical will also set the stage for everything else Pope Francis has planned in 2015. He’s a man with a mission to save the world from the accelerating threats to the planet’s natural resources. More immediate, the encyclical will serve as major talking points for his address to the joint session of Congress in September, his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York and his December message to the historic UN Climate Conference in Paris. Many of his points on the environment are already well known.

When Pope Francis addresses the U.S. Congress he will confront a hostile caucus of 169 hard-line GOP climate-science deniers who dismiss the idea that global warming is human-caused, in part because collectively they have received more than $52 million in career contributions from Big Oil, coal and fossil-fuel interests, three times what the other members of the Congress, who agree climate change is a threat the survival of our civilization, received.

GOP climate-science deniers in Congress include Catholics like House Speaker John Boehner, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a likely 2016 presidential candidate, as well as former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Committee, all of whom will be listening to Pope Francis. Sitting with them will be Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, author of “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.”

Also listening to Pope Francis will be the GOP’s Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who recently tried to “undermine international negotiations aimed at combating climate change” by publicly “telling other countries not to trust President Obama’s promise to significantly reduce the United States carbon emissions.”

And in yet another desperate act, McConnell also sent a letter to the governors of all 50 states encouraging them to ignore federal laws enforcing the Environmental Protection Agency’s “clean air regulations designed to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.” His state is a big coal-mining state.

The ever-smiling, upbeat Pope Francis, a former boxer, loves a good fight. But he’s laser-locked on his real target — encouraging action — inviting hundreds of millions of the Catholic faithful, in fact inviting all seven billion people worldwide, to join a global economic revolution.

Here are eight of the pope’s public warnings edited in the Catholic Climate Covenant, from his “Apostolic Exhortation,” from the Guardian and other news sources, warnings on the rapidly accelerating climate change and global warming risks to the environment, along with our individual responsibility to “safeguard Creation, for we are the custodians of Creation. If we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us.” Listen to the pope’s warnings.

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Taken from: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/pope-franciss-new-climate-change-encyclical-sneak-preview-2015-04-09

Resurrection and the Shroud: ‘a New Dimension’, ‘a New Science’.

by

 Damien F. Mackey

  

 

Reading through, this Lent and Easter,

 

by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI,

I was struck by his marvellous discussion of

the Resurrection of Jesus Christ –

“a divine action in history and nature

that changed history and nature in a radical way”.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

“What we have here is probably a new branch of quantum physics

that will tell us new findings about our universe.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It reminded me, too, of the startling reality of the Shroud of Turin, that believers think is an actual testimony to the Resurrection, and that some scientifically-minded scholars have argued has so seriously challenged the boundaries of conventional science as to demand new scientific paradigms. Like the Resurrection, that has, in the words of Benedict, “changed history and nature in a radical way”. One of these scientists is Dame Isabel Piczek, a particle physicist and monumental artist of international repute. Whilst she believes that: “As a spiritual phenomenon the Shroud should be left to theology to discuss,” she will go on to say: “But the bodily resurrection, the Shroud of Turin and the whole circumstance of the image on the Shroud involves matter, although matter seen in a startlingly different way. What we have here is probably a new branch of quantum physics that will tell us new findings about our universe.” (http://www.northernway.org/weblog/?p=32 emphasis added).

The article continues:

 

Dame Piczek thinks that the Shroud image was created in an infinitesimally small fraction of a second. But, she says, the image may have been created by a complex process arising as Christ’s body passed from one form of existence into another. She notes that it may be “Something akin to the Big Bang, but at the opposite end of the creation continuum — a portal opens into a new science and eventually into a new form of human existence.”

[End of quote]

 

As one commentator remarked: "... the door between science and faith is not closed ...".

 

I also recommend a terrific book on the Shroud by Jerome Corsi, “The Shroud Codex”. It is fiction, but it explores the idea that cutting edge quantum physics may be pointing in the direction of such a new dimension as argued by Dame Piczek and by Pope Benedict, who in turn has written in Jesus of Nazareth: “Christ’s Resurrection . . . is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it. Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here . . . [and think of] the Resurrection as something akin to a radical “evolutionary leap,” in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence. Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality”.

 

 

We read in a review of Corsi’s book (http://www.wnd.com/2010/04/142581/#yvJbrDEHF7l):

 

There’s just one problem with Dan Brown’s mega-blockbusters “Angels and Demons” and especially “The Da Vinci Code.” Though they’re entertaining, superbly crafted stories, underneath it all there’s always this not-so-subtle intent to inject doubt into believers and nudge them toward the soulless, cynical sophistication of modernity.

Now here comes No. 1 New York Times best-selling author Jerome Corsi with a novel – his first fiction effort – that combines the Vatican, particle physics, atheism, the Shroud of Turin, what appear to be dramatic supernatural events and much more, all into a stunning mystery of science and faith.

…. But the difference is that Corsi is taking the reader in the opposite direction than Dan Brown – toward faith, rather than away from it".

[End of quote]

 

Now, thanks to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our own immortal soul “can find its “space,” its “bodiliness”,” Benedict continues:

 

The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs to the sphere of the divine and eternal. From now on, as Tertullian once said, “spirit and blood” have a place within God. . . . Even if man by his nature is created for immortality, it is only now that the place exists in which his immortal soul can find its “space,” its “bodiliness,” in which immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind. This is what is meant by those passages in Saint Paul’s prison letters (cf. Colossians 1.12–23 and Ephesians 1. 3–23) that speak of the cosmic body of Christ, indicating thereby that Christ’s transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are therefore able to live definitively in the fullness of indestructible life. . . . [Thus] Jesus’s Resurrection was not just about some deceased individual coming back to life at a certain point. . . . [An] ontological leap occurred, one that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.

[End of quote]

 

“[An] ontological leap occurred”. Dame Piczek, writing along similar lines, boldly claims that “we have nothing less in the tomb of Christ than the beginning of a new Universe.”

 

In 2004, Dame Piczek, working independently made a discovery that could change everything we think we know about the world we live in. Time, space and energy apparently interact in a way never before predicted. This discovery soon received support from two completely independent sources: a group of laser scientists and a former U.S. Apollo astronaut. According to some observers, this new information could ignite a scientific revolution, or perhaps even provide something much more important to mankind . . . like the secrets of life itself . . . perhaps even eternal life.

Dame Piczek, was fascinated by the total lack of distortion on the Shroud image, a physical impossibility if the body had been lying on solid rock. She created a full-sized, three-dimensional reproduction of the body and discovered what she believes to be a true “event horizon,” or, a moment when all the laws of physics change drastically.

“Two things are immediately obvious; the image-forming action at a distance had ‘nothing to do with gravity’ . . . and the new field does not have an anti-field, otherwise the two images would not show the same exact system,” says Dame Piczek. “Summarizing all of these qualities, the Shroud puts us in the realm of raw creation . . . we have nothing less in the tomb of Christ than the beginning of a new Universe.”