Pope Francis made his strongest statements yet about climate change Wednesday, rebuking fossil fuel companies and urging countries to make an immediate transition to renewable energy.
In a new document titled “Laudate Deum,” or “Praise God,” the pope criticizes oil and gas companies for greenwashing new fossil fuel projects and calls for more ambitious efforts in the West to tackle the climate crisis. In the landmark apostolic exhortation, a form of papal writing, Francis says that “avoiding an increase of a tenth of a degree in the global temperature would already suffice to alleviate some suffering for many people.”
“Laudate Deum” is a follow-up to the pope’s 2015 encyclical on climate change, known as “Laudato Si’,” which lamented the exploitation of the planet and cast the protection of the environment as a moral imperative. When it was released, “Laudato Si’” was viewed as an extraordinary move by the head of the Catholic Church to address global warming and its consequences.
Nearly a decade later, the pope’s message has taken on new urgency.
While it’s important to note all the harm that has been done by bad actors in its ranks, the Roman Catholic Church has been a huge supporter of science for a long time now.
The anti-intellectualism movements in many churches right now are a fairly recent trend. Many of the world’s most-prestigous institutions of education and science were founded as religious institutions.
Understanding the natural world was long seen as examining the majesty of creation. The more people learned about the universe the grander its scale.
But of course there have also been times in history where the powerful worked tirelessly to deny people education and opportunity as they hoarded wealth for themselves, and they coopted churches to convince the people that knowledge was evil and that suffering was a sign of Godliness.
It’s also important to note that even the Roman Catholic Church is not a monolith. There are certainly those in its hierarchy who are as bad as you might expect, and others who are far more progressive than you’d guess. And when most people (at least and especially in America) say christian, they mostly mean protestant, which is even far less monolithic than the Catholics since it’s a bunch of similar churches with their own or sometimes no hierarchical structures.