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Uh oh, suddenly the Pope's leftist agenda hit's an iceberg.
Pope Francis Climate Change and Abortion Are Interrelated - NationalJournal.com
Pope Francis: Climate Change and Abortion Are ‘Interrelated’
June 18, 2015 Pope Francis has unveiled an encyclical—a rare and influential Vatican statement—on climate change and the environment.
The highly anticipated document says that global warming is real, is caused partly by human activity, and is a grave threat to humanity. The Vatican hopes it will pave the way for a strong international climate deal later this year when diplomats descend on Paris for United Nations talks. But Pope Francis wants the encyclical to be read by everyone—and the Vatican hopes that the document will influence much more than just the Paris talks.
And just so his message is clear, the Vatican's official Twitter account, @Pontifex, has been active Thursday morning with blunt views from the pope. "The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth," reads one tweet.
Here are six key points from the encyclical.
Population Control Is Not the Answer
For Pope Francis, caring about the environment goes hand in hand with taking a strong stand against abortion. "Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion," the encyclical says. "How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?"
Francis suggests that efforts to slow population growth are misguided and a distraction from the underlying cause of the world's environmental crisis—the hoarding of the Earth's resources by the rich and powerful. "To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues," the encyclical says.
This Isn't Just About the Environment
While the encyclical is centered around climate change and the environment, the overall message takes broad swipes at the consumer culture and calls for humans to cut back. "We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something that we have created ourselves," Francis writes, one of several times he warns about the dangers of technology created without a thought to its long-term impacts.
The encyclical also takes a broad look at humans' overall relationships with each other, saying that development in the last century has "not always led to an integral development and an improvement in the quality of life" and highlighting effects like social aggression and drug use. Even the digital revolution gets a mention: "Today's media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears, and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences."
International Action Is Needed, But Only the Right Kind
The encyclical says that governments need to think as "one world with a common plan," saying that individual nations may not always act in everyone's interest or have enforceable measures on their own. But Francis also expresses disappointment with international negotiators in the past, saying that 2012 talks in Rio de Janiero only produced "a wide-ranging but ineffectual outcome document," in part because developed countries were only thinking of their own self-interests. Other more narrow agreements, like the Basel Convention on hazardous waste or the Vienna Convention on the ozone layer have been more effective, though.
Pope Francis Climate Change and Abortion Are Interrelated - NationalJournal.com