Pope Francis and Climate Change

The Catholic Church has a long history, and in much of that time it has not been a force for good, but rather has stood for corruption, repression and stubborn conservatism. Even in The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century work, the portrayal of the church is for the most part very negative. In modern times, the Catholic Church retains some exceptionally backward ideas about contraception, women, and homosexuality, among other things. I remember once years ago when Time magazine selected Pope John Paul II as its Man of the Year, one political cartoonist parodied their choice by drawing a magazine with John Paul II on the cover as Man of the Year, but with the name of the magazine changed to Behind the Times. While for the most part the Catholic Church is not nearly as radically right wing as many evangelical Protestant churches, given its size as the single largest Christian denomination in the world and indeed the world’s largest hierarchally-organized religious sect, with the Pope exercising ultimate religious authority over a billion people, its conservative bent has meant has acted as a major hindrance to progress on many issues. In other words, my overall view of the Catholic Church has tended to be negative. However, this has changed somewhat since Pope Francis took charge. While the Catholic Church still has many negatives, Francis has shown that with the right kind of leadership it can still be a strong force for good, a message he has reinforced with his recently released encyclical on climate change and the environment.

In the short time he has been in charge, Francis has managed to drastically change the image of the Catholic Church and the tone of its pronouncements, even if the substance of its teachings has not changed much. To a large degree, this has been due to a change in emphasis. Past Popes like John Paul II and Benedict XVI seemed to focus much more on defending some of the Church’s more conservative positions, such as its views on contraception, abortion and homosexuality. Francis, while not actually abandoning or contradicting these positions, except to express greater tolerance of those with views contrary to the Church’s teachings, has chosen to emphasize issues such as social justice and fighting poverty, areas where even in the past the Church has done much good. The problem in past years has been that the Vatican and much of the rest of the hierarchy has seemed to care much less about social justice than fighting for socially conservative positions or even covering up its own flaws, such as all the sexual abuse scandals that have come to light in past years. Symptomatic of this warped emphasis is the fact that many priests who had been found to be guilty of sexual abuse went unpunished, while one American nun who performed an emergency abortion in a hospital to save a woman’s life was excommunicated, though she was eventually reinstated. Another example is the case of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the American association of nuns that was punished by the Vatican for placing too much emphasis on social justice rather than the church’s teachings on issues such as abortion. However, despite initially allowing the inquiry (or perhaps we should say Inquisition) into the group’s work to continue, he ended it in April of this year and met with a delegation of the nuns for almost an hour. Also, he has removed some of the more conservative church officials from power and seems to genuinely be attempting to change the Church’s overall direction, thereby allowing it to play a more positive role in society.

This latest encyclical is a powerful example of the kind of positive role the Church can play in the world under Francis’s leadership. In essence, Francis has declared that fighting climate change and protecting the environment is a moral issue, one that it is intimately tied to fighting poverty and struggling for social justice, as it is the poor and disadvantaged of the world that will suffer – indeed are already suffering – from the effects of climate change, which, as he notes, is "a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods [that] represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day". He reviews the scientific consensus on climate change and points out the urgency of doing something about it now, noting "it is remarkable how weak international political responses have been". He condemns the short-sighted greed that has led to not only to our continued pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere despite our growing awareness of the harm they are causing but also other sorts of environmental destruction in so much of the world and declares that we need to radically adjust our priorities. He calls out over-consumption by the wealthy nations of the world as being a major cause of our current problems and calls on people to stop viewing endless economic growth and acquisition of material goods as “progress”, but instead to work to improve quality of life. Indeed, aside from being a much needed call to action on climate change, the encyclical is also an indictment of the entire system of rampant capitalism that ruins the environment and tramples on the poor and disadvantaged in the name of short term profit, as "economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain". He notes that claims that God gave the world to humans to exploit at will are bad theology, arguing "we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures", as it is clear that the Bible calls on humans to be good stewards of the Earth and its resources and that "responsibility for God’s earth means that human beings, endowed with intelligence, must respect the laws of nature and the delicate equilibria existing between the creatures of this world."

While I have not read the entire encyclical (and at 191 pages I may not ever get around to doing so), I agree pretty much completely with all the excerpts and paraphrases I’ve seen so far, with one notable exception, one that shows that Francis, for all his progressive pronouncements, still holds to some of the Church’s more backward teachings. At one point, he criticizes the view that overpopulation is to blame for the environmental problems we face and that we just need to limit population growth. Of course, few if any people with an understanding of the issues believes that overpopulation alone is the problem or halting population growth alone is the solution. Of course, as Francis says, over-consumption, waste and inequality, not to mention the short-sighted pursuit of profits that leads people to extract and burn destructive fossil fuels rather than search for alternatives, are at least as much the issue as population, if not more. There is no question that we could easily feed, clothe, house and educate all of the world’s seven billion plus people if we distributed our resources more equitably and used them more wisely. But it is also unquestionable that this would be much easier if there were far fewer people, and it will become much harder if the population keeps increasing at anything near the current rate. While so far our food production has managed to keep pace with our population growth, thanks to innovations such as the “green revolution” in agriculture, it is foolish to just assume it will continue to do so. No matter how environmentally sustainable our lifestyles, seven billion people cannot help but create a rather substantial strain on the Earth’s carrying capacity and great pressure on the habitats of other species, and of course it will be worse with eight, nine or ten billion. So even if we do everything else Francis suggests, population growth must still be restrained – not coercively, like in China, but through education and read availability of contraceptives and other forms of birth control, especially to women. This of course is the unspoken reason for Francis’s dismissal of overpopulation as an issue; admitting it was a problem would be an admission that the Church’s teaching on contraception is wrong and even harmful. While Francis appears to be far more willing than his predecessors to tolerate the use of contraception by Catholics, already quite common despite the Church’s position on them, he doesn’t seem to be prepared to actually overturn this, probably the most harmful of the Church’s teachings.

But despite this one notable flaw, if Catholics and even non-Catholics could take what the encyclical teaches to heart, the world would definitely be a better place. Of course, many will not, and even before its release right-wingers, conservatives, climate deniers, fossil fuel profiteers and others (many of which groups also happened to be targets for sharp criticism in the encyclical), began attacking it. Catholic Republicans like Rick Santorum and Jeb Bush questioned the appropriateness of the Pope addressing an issue such as climate change, saying he should stick to moral teachings. This is despite Francis’s convincing framing of human stewardship of the Earth as a moral issue, which makes at least as much logical sense than declaring homosexuality or even contraception to be a moral issue – indeed, I would say that these two only become a moral issue when people attack the former or try to reduce availability of the latter, because it is such attacks that are immoral. These Republican critics decry the Pope getting involved in what they call a “political” issue, but they don’t seem to object to the Church making pronouncements on abortion, which is at least as much a political issue as climate change. Indeed, as everything is some sense political, saying the Church should not express a viewpoint on political issues is tantamount to saying it should not express a viewpoint on anything. Furthermore, climate change is, or should be, much less a political issue than it is; it is only the climate deniers who reject the overwhelming scientific evidence who make it into a political issue. Or rather, the real political issue with climate change is not whether to do something about it, but what exactly we should do, and how we should distribute responsibility for taking action.

It’s worth pointing out that while the extreme right wing views of certain prominent Catholics like Santorum, Bush, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, or the various Catholic leaders who spoke against the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act might give the impression that most American Catholics take very conservative positions on issues such as climate change or homosexuality, polls show that in fact Francis’s position on climate change is more in accord with most American Catholics than with these political “leaders”, and many also support same-sex marriage (something that is true of many Catholics in other countries as well, with Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland being leaders in legalizing same-sex marriage). As is the case with the views of American Jews on Israel, where most ordinary Jews support a negotiated two-state solution and are willing to see Israel receive constructive criticism but many major Jewish organizations (with the notable exception of J Street) take a hardline position that admits of no criticism of Israel, it seems sometimes that the most extreme Catholics are the loudest and so give a misleading impression of the views of Catholics in general (for that matter, the same is true of Protestants, as many mainline Protestant churches favor action on climate change and support same-sex marriage, unlike some of the most outspoken Protestants who wave their opposition like a banner).

This encyclical, with its broad acceptance of the scientific consensus and its solid summary of the science itself, is also a reminder that despite some of the black marks in its past like the suppression of Galileo and the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, Catholics as individuals and even the Church itself has often played a positive role in advancing science. Many important scientific ideas, including genetics and the Big Bang, were first proposed by Catholics, and the Church itself accepts basic scientific ideas such as evolution, unlike many evangelical Protestants. Francis, who apparently has a background in chemistry, has consulted widely with scientists on climate change and indeed seems to have almost as much of a personal interest in science as the Dalai Lama, a religious leader who he has much in common with. Both of them accept that it makes no sense for religion to attempt to oppose itself to science, but rather to use science to help find ways to make the world a better place. With this encyclical on climate change, Francis has helped point out to both Catholics and non-Catholics ways in which we can work together to do just that.