pope francis bak

1019

hmn is this really baK? HTML fail on main 820 "obsession" 2x

see 820 txt bak

---

AN 525

When the Vatican announced that 69-year-old Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, would be replacing the late Pope Francis, many moderate and liberal Catholics in the United States applauded the choice as historic. Chicago native Prevost is now the first American pope in the long history of the Catholic Church.

But far-right MAGA Republicans responded to the announcement with anger and are disappointed that Pope Leo has similar views to Pope Francis and isn't a far-right social conservative.

In an article published on May 21, The Guardian's Julian Coman notes the ideological differences between far-right MAGA Catholics — including Vice President JD Vance and "War Room" host Steve Bannon — and the new pope.

MAGA conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer was quick to attack Pope Leo after the announcement, describing him as "anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis" on X, formerly Twitter. Loomer is Jewish, not Catholic, but according to Coman, MAGA Catholics share that view of him.

IFrame Content

"The comic-book casting of the new pope as a globalist villain in the U.S. culture wars is traceable back to his predecessor's impact on liberal opinion a decade ago," Coman explains. "Pope Francis' sometimes-lonely championing of progressive causes, such as the rights of migrants, gave him a kind of liberal celebrity and led Time Magazine to name him 'Person of the Year' in 2013. Pope Leo, born in Chicago, has been pre-emptively caricatured by much of the MAGA right as a continuity pontiff who will, in effect, front up the religious wing of the Democratic Party."

Coman continues, "Leaving the simplistic conflation of religious perspective and political positioning aside, the truth is far more interesting than that. It may also be more challenging for Catholic MAGA luminaries such as the vice-president, JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump's sometime adviser Steve Bannon if they are serious about their faith."

The Guardian journalist describes Vance (who was raised Protestant but converted to Catholicism) and Bannon as "representatives of a traditionalist movement in the church" that "sought to undermine Francis' papacy at every turn and has become a kind of theological vanguard for the America First era."

"Enter Pope Leo," Coman writes. "The most geographically diverse conclave in church history was surely aware that in choosing an American to succeed Francis, it was setting up a potential showdown between the Vatican and Trumpian nationalism."

Nonetheless, some right-wing Catholics are defending Pope Leo, including Philadelphia-based immigration attorney and political columnist Christine Flowers.

In a May 9 column for Broad & Liberty, Flowers stressed that while she was hoping for a more "conservative" pope and has disagreements with Pope Leo, she admires him as a person. Flowers wrote, "This Pope is one for the 21st Century, and if he is the last one that I encounter before I am consecrated with last rites, I will die a happy woman."

*Read Julian Coman's full article for The Guardian at this link.

---

On March 14, 2024, Pope Francis on Thursday encouraged a closer collaboration between Indigenous and scientific knowledge to address climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and threats to food and health security facing the world today.

The National Indian Health Board on Tuesday said the Pope’s acknowledgement is a step forward.

The Pope’s recognition of the value of Indigenous knowledge resonates deeply with the National Indian Health Board’s International work that has focused on defining and improving Indigenous Determinants of Health to improve the health and well-being of all American Indian, Alaska Natives, and Indigenous Peoples globally, the National Indian Health Board said in a press release.

Indian Country

“The National Indian Health Board has worked towards, and supports the Pope’s focus on a world view that incorporates Indigenous knowledge and determinants of health in the broader global efforts to mitigate climate change,” Stacy Bohlen, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, NIHB CEO said. “This is another acknowledgement that follows others on the international stage, that indigenous peoples hold game changing solutions to many modern problems through both longstanding knowledge and their experiences.”

The National Indian Health Boards has long recognized that Indigenous cultures hold valuable insights into sustainable living and environmental stewardship. Through millennia of living in harmony with nature, Indigenous communities have developed a profound understanding of ecological systems and the interconnectedness of all living beings.

“The culture of Indigenous people can heal the earth and its people,” William Smith, a citizen of the EYAK Tribe in the Alaska Village of Valdez and Chairman of NIHB said. “It is imperative that we elevate indigenous voices and incorporate their knowledge into global efforts to address the climate crisis.”

---

exposing-the-climate-apocalypse (https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/exposing-the-climate-apocalypse)

EXPOSING THE NONEXISTENT CLIMATE APOCALYPSE

NEWS: US NEWS (https://www.churchmilitant.com/search/category/246/us-news)

[grx]

candid challenge to climate change dogma

you are not signed in as a Premium user; you are viewing the free version of this program. Premium users have access to full-length programs with limited commercials and receive a 10% discount in the store! Sign up for only one day for the low cost of $1.99. Click the button below.

...

BALTIMORE (ChurchMilitant.com (http://churchmilitant.com/)) – As the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) convened in Baltimore for its fall Plenary Assembly, a prominent climate change critic and former Republican political aide stood nearby to challenge both the climate change narrative and the hierarchy's commitment to it.

pix Marc Morano

At a press conference (https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/spro-challenging-climate-claims) on Tuesday, Marc Morano offered a vigorous critique of both the mainstream climate change narrative and involvement by the Church — from Pope Francis to the USCCB.

He critically assessed the approaches of the United Nations and Pope Francis toward climate change, arguing the driving force is not science but rather sociopolitical agendas such as wealth redistribution.

The press conference was held at the Four Seasons Hotel by the Deposit of Faith Coalition, religious and political conservatives (https://www.churchmilitant.com/dof) partnering with scientists and climate experts to expose the fraud and misinformation that are weakening the American economy.

Challenging Church Involvement

Morano stressed that Pope Francis' alignment with U.N. climate initiatives (https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/pope-francis-to-attend-cop28) deviates from core scientific and religious principles and falls outside the Church's competency and mission to save souls.

Morano also portrayed the climate change movement as a secular religion.[

https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/exposing-the-climate-apocalypse#)

Although Francis urges world leaders to act on climate change, warning (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pope-francis-urges-world-leaders-to-act-on-climate-change-as-planet-nears-point-of-no-return) of a "point of no return," Morano illustrated that such apocalyptic warnings are not new, using historical examples to show a tendency for hyperbole. Specifically, he cited an 1864 statement by George Perkins Marsh warning of "climatic excess" unless humanity altered its course.

Morano also portrayed the climate change movement as a secular religion. He cited the earth vigils held in Central Park during the People's Climate March in New York City, where participants engaged in what he described as a "serious, spiritual message of people communing with Mother Earth."

](https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/exposing-the-climate-apocalypse#)

Challenging Climate Claims

He argued that such events demonstrate how climate change activism has taken on religious-like fervor and even includes rituals. Morano also referenced a 2023 Time magazine article advocating making Earth Day a religious holiday, further illustrating his point about the intertwining of environmental activism with religious-like reverence.

He criticized the blending of climate change activism with religious observance, especially by the Catholic hierarchy, which he explained is acting outside its competency, causing confusion and discord among the faithful.

Impacts of Climate Policy

In his address, Morano expressed apprehension about the societal repercussions of proposed climate policies. He highlighted the risks of adopting authoritarian measures, such as climate lockdowns and lifestyle mandates, and drew parallels to the overreaches observed in recent years due to concerns about COVID-19. He emphasized that such policies could infringe upon personal freedoms and alter the fabric of daily life.

He cautioned against the centralization of food production and property ownership.

Morano further spotlighted figures like Bill Gates and the push for synthetic meat. He cautioned against the centralization of food production and property ownership, framing it as a modern form of serfdom endangering individual autonomy and traditional agricultural practices. He also pointed to the potential implications of these policies on food security and rural communities.

In his concluding remarks, Morano underscored his commitment to offering an alternative perspective on climate change and climate policy through his books and ClimateDepot.com (https://www.climatedepot.com/). He emphasized the importance of engaging in informed and balanced discussions on these critical issues.

Marc Morano is a well-known figure in the climate policy debate, challenging mainstream climate narratives through his work. He advocates for a balanced approach that weighs environmental sustainability against economic viability.

---

1123

rw sci biden refuse

Nobel Prize Winner Debunks Climate Hysteria – One America News Network (https://www.oann.com/video/in-focus-video/nobel-prize-winner-debunks-climate-hysteria/)

nobel Prize Winner Debunks Climate Hysteria - One America News Network

One America News Network

... Pearson Sharp Reports · Daily Feed · LIVE. Search … Nobel Prize Winner Debunks Climate Hysteria. with Marc Morano. 0:00 / 0:00. 15 seconds. 15 seconds.

Exposing the Nonexistent Climate Apocalypse - Church Militant

Church Militant

Marc Morano is a well-known figure in the climate policy debate, challenging mainstream climate narratives through his work. He advocates for a ...

The slow demise of green energy? - Fox News

Fox News

The push toward a net zero utopia is not practical and has been a complete disservice to the American consumer. Components of the green movement ..

---

https://www.desmog.com/2018/12/12/controversial-australian-climate-science-denier-cardinal-george-pell-removed-vatican-advisory-group/

---

an 1120

250k kia US

Communist': Far-right extremists explode in anger after Pope Francis applauds life-saving COVID restrictions

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumps-nomination-of-amy-coney-barrett-another-step-toward-christian-fascism

originally appeared at Scheerpost. Used by permission.

The Christian right is content to have the focus on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett revolve around her opposition to abortion and membership in People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices "speaking in tongues." What it does not want examined is her abject subservience to corporate power, her hostility to workers, civil liberties, unions and environmental regulations. And since the Democratic Party is beholden to the same donor class as the Republican Party, and since the media long ago substituted the culture wars for politics, the most ominous threat Barrett's appointment to the court represents is going unmentioned.

All fascist and totalitarian movements paper over their squalid belief systems with the veneer of morality. They mouth pieties about restoring law and order, right and wrong, the sanctity of life, civic and family virtues, patriotism and tradition to mask their dismantling of the open society and silencing and persecution of those who oppose them. This is the real game being played by Christian fascists, who since the early 1970s have been building institutions with tens of millions in corporate donations to take power.

Donald Trump, who has no ideology, has allowed the Christian right to fill his ideological void. He is the useful idiot. And the Christian right, awash in money from corporations that know their real political intent, will mobilize in this election to use any tool, no matter how devious, from right-wing armed militias to the invalidation of ballots, to block Joe Biden and Democratic candidates from assuming office. The road to despotism is always paved with righteousness. This was as true for Soviet communism as it was for German fascism. And it is true in the United States.

Capitalism, driven by the twin obsessions of maximizing profit and reducing the cost of production by slashing workers' rights and wages, is antithetical to the Christian Gospel, as well as the Enlightenment ethic defined by Immanuel Kant. But capitalism, in the hands of the Christian fascists, has become sacralized in the form of theProsperity Gospel, the belief that Jesus came to minister to our material needs, blessing believers with wealth and power. The Prosperity Gospel delights the corporations that have carried out the slow-motion corporate coup.

This is why large corporations such as Tyson Foods, which places Christian right chaplains in its plants, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam's Warehouse, along with many other corporations, pour money into the movement and its institutions such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. This is why corporations have given millions to groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to campaign for Barrett's appointment to the court. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, greenlight fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge,Barrett "faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations."

Her version of Catholicism is at odds with most of the positions championed by Pope Francisand traditional Catholic teaching on women's rights, voting rights, immigrants' rights, health care and environmental protections. The pope calls on the downtrodden to change the world economic order and denounces what he terms a "new colonialism" imposed by "the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain 'free trade' treaties, and the imposition of measures of 'austerity' which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor." He speaks of the "sacred rights" of labor, lodging and land. He says the unfettered pursuit of money is "the dung of the devil" and castigates industrial nations for exploiting the raw materials and labor of the developing world.

Pope Francis has repeatedly warned that time is running out to save the planet from perhaps irreversible harm to the ecosystem. "Let us not be afraid to say it: We want change, real change, structural change," the pope has stated, decrying a system that "has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature."

"This system is by now intolerable: Farm workers find it intolerable; laborers find it intolerable; communities find it intolerable; peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself — our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say — also finds it intolerable," he said.

Barrett's religiosity, like that of other Christian fascists, is in the service of almost everything the pope condemns.

These corporations don't give a damn about abortion, gun rights or the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. But like the German industrialists who backed the Nazi Party, they know that the Christian right will give an ideological veneer to ruthless corporate tyranny. These corporations view the Christian fascists the same way the German industrialists viewed the Nazis, as buffoons. They are aware that the Christian fascists will trash what is left of our anemic democracy and the natural ecosystem. But they also know they will make huge profits in the process and the rights of workers and citizens will be ruthlessly suppressed.

If you are poor, if you lack proper medical care, if you are paid substandard wages, if you are trapped in the lower class, if you are a victim of police violence, this is because, according to this ideology, you are not a good Christian and not blessed by God. In this belief system you deserve what you get. There is nothing wrong, these homegrown fascists preach, with the structures or systems of power. It is the mantra of self-help that made gurus like Oprah and Tony Robbins rich dressed up as the voice of God.

The Christian fascists, allied with organization such as the Federalist Society, have appointed two Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — as well as nearly 200 other judges with lifetime appointments to lower federal courts during the Trump administration.They claim to be strict "originalists." Originalists argue that the meaning of the constitutional text is fixed and immune to interpretation. Originalists denounce jurists who argue that constitutional law should respond to changing circumstances and values. The Originalists already have five Federalist Society Supreme Court justices. Barrett would be the sixth. (Two of them, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, were supported in the nomination process by Joe Biden.)

The legal calculus for the Christian right no longer revolves around the concept of universal human rights but around the tenets of "Bible-believing Christians" who supposedly authored the Constitution. Huge segments of the population are stripped of moral worth and legal protection. This process is incremental and often unseen. As the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels understood: "The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative."

Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, astutely noted how at first the Nazis "changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system.They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittle], at once the most public and most secret." And, Klemperer noted, as the redefinition of old concepts took place the public was oblivious.

These Christian fascists understand the deep sickness that infects American society. They know how to exploit the moral and physical decay, as well as the despair it causes, to lure its followers towards their brand of tyranny. They are not wrong when they lambast the cruelty, corruption, emptiness and hypocrisy of the ruling elites, especially the liberal elites. They are not wrong when they mock cultural relativism, the idea that good and evil, right and wrong, truth and untruth, do not exist. It is part of the sad irony that the Christian right effectively exploits this cultural relativism to seize power. The failure of the liberal Christian church to denounce the Christian right as heretics, in the name of tolerance and cultural relativism, has given the Christian fascists religious legitimacy. At the same time, the Christian right seeks to delegitimize the liberal church as apostates. History has shown that it is unwise to tolerate the intolerant.

The Christian fascists, like all fascist movements, seek to create their own truth. It discredits verifiable fact, science, law and rationality. It promises a new, glorious world of moral renewal and prosperity.It promises a creator who will carry out miracles for believers and for America. It calls on followers to abandon the world of cause and effect and replace it with a world of magic. The reality-based world, as in all totalitarian movements, is snuffed out.

The Trump administration has implanted Christian fascists in senior positions of government, including Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Mike Pompeo to secretary of state, Betsy DeVos to secretary of education, Ben Carson to secretary of housing and urban development, William Barr to attorney general, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and televangelist Paula White to Trump's Faith and Opportunities Initiative. Trump gave the Christian right veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts. Almost all the judges he has appointed were selected by the Federalist Society and the Christian right. Many of the extremists among his judicial appointees have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association, the country's largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers.

Trump has embraced the Islamophobia of the Christian right to ban Muslim immigrants and roll back civil rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. He has degraded LGBTQ rights. He has allocated federal money to Christian charter schools. He has ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from endorsing political candidates. His Christian right appointees, including Pence, DeVos and Pompeo,regularly use biblical strictures to justify an array of policy decisions including environmental deregulation, war, tax cuts and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private "Christian" schools.

The Christian fascists are not finished. Brick by brick they are building a Christian fascist state. Barrett fills one more hole in the wall. They will do this with or without Trump.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/pope-calls-on-global-community-to-confront-destructive-effects-of-empire-of-money/

no lnx

Pope calls on global community to confront 'destructive effects of empire of money'

Julia Conley and Common Dreams October 05, 2020

In his third encyclical Sunday morning, Pope Francis denounced free market capitalism and the "magic" theory of trickle-down economics, saying the coronavirus pandemic has once and for all disproven the notion that economic policies that are aimed at benefiting the already-rich will benefit low-income people through job creation and investments.

The 45,000 word document, titled "Fratelli Tutti" meaning "Brothers All" or "Brothers and Sisters All," indicated the pope's belief that the pandemic has shown that a major overhaul of global economic systems is needed, as the crisis has disproportionately affected the poor in countries including the U.S., Brazil, and the U.K.; revealed thedivide between low-income workers all over the world who have had limited access to government aid and professionals who are able to work from home; and caused the "most unequal" recession in modern U.S. history.

"Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality," Pope Francis said.

"Thefragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom," the encyclical continued.

The document implicitly rebuked conservative and neo-liberal views in the U.S. and other wealthy nations. In the U.S., the pandemic has so far eliminated low-paying jobs at eight times the rate of high-wage jobs, and Republican leaders in the Senate have scoffed at Democrats' proposal to continue the $600-per-week unemployment benefit introduced in March, despite evidence that it had a measurable positive impact on poverty levels in the United States for several months this year. Instead, the GOP has prioritized protecting corporations from liability should their employees contract the coronavirus after returning to work.

Previous economic crises, such as the recession in 2008 and 2009, have ultimately "increased freedom for the truly powerful, who always find a way to escape unscathed," Pope Francis remarked. Now, he said, society must confront "the destructive effects of the empire of money."

Those with economic power must "administer it for the good of all" rather than hoarding wealth, he said, suggesting that this applies both to individual countries like theU.S.—where a recent analysis by the People's Policy Project showed that nearly 80% of wealth is currently owned by millionaires and billionaires, who make up just 12% of the population—and to the global community, where leaders of developing countries recently asked if their populations will be "left to die" after the U.S., Russia, and Brazil refused to commit to a global effort to make a Covid-19 vaccine available to all.

Private property cannot be considered a right if a select few in a society live in luxury while others have nothing, the pope added.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a spiritual writer and leader of the Poor People's Campaign in the U.S., interpreted Pope Francis's words as a call for an "international Poor People's Campaign."

"There seems to be no place for popular movements that unite the unemployed, temporary and informal workers, and many others who do not easily find a place in existing structures," said the Pope.

Rev. Dr. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, thanked the popefor "calling the church to stand with poor people's movements around the world" in the midst of the pandemic and beyond.

Laudato Si

https://www.academia.edu/41010523/Laudato_si_four_years_later

new

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082020/climate-change-pope-francis

When Pope Francis issued his landmark teaching document on climate change in 2015, his words went straight to the heart of Susan Varlamoff.

Varlamoff, 70, a biologist, read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in the 1960s and speaks proudly of a Catholic faith that embraces science and calls on church members to take care of the earth. Her sister, she said, died from cancer as a child, and she wondered whether her father's liberal use of pesticides in their suburban yard might have been the cause.

She asked Archbishop Wilton Gregory, who was then the leader of 1.2 million Catholics in Atlanta and across much of Georgia, whether she could write a review for the archdiocese of the Pope's "Laudato Si': On Care for our Common Home," the first encyclical to be dedicated to the environment.

Instead, he asked for an action plan.

so with her colleagues at the University of Georgia, Varlamoff wrote and illustrated a 52-page treatise on the science of climate change that offered Georgians motivated by their faith a road map for dealing with a warming earth.

The plan strengthened climate education at Catholic schools across much of the state and prompted a series of local energy audits and efficiency improvements at churches and schools. It also provided a template for climate action among Catholics nationwide.

"Slowly, we are starting to make our way and to get this information out," said Varlamoff, who has since retired. "We are exchanging best practices. There are so many Catholic scientists who desperately want to work for caring for creation. We are just moving forward with people who believe as we do."

Laudato Si' represented a seminal integration of the environment and humanity (the title is from the first words of the encyclical, "Praise be to you my Lord"). But earlier this year, Francis criticized world governments for their "very weak" response to the climate crisis. In June, he issued guidance for carrying out his climate encyclical that included calling on Catholics to divest themselves of investments in fossil fuel companies.

With this new sense of urgency, the Vatican launched a year-long program of Laudato Si' activities and put in place a new, seven-year call to action.

The encyclical broadly accepts the scientific consensus that climate change is principally a man-made phenomenon. Without prompt global action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and slow the planet's warming, it says, there will be profound environmental, social, political and economic consequences. The pope clearly identifies the use of fossil fuels as a cause of climate change.

Yale University scholar Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, described the pope's commitment on climate as "unprecedented," and said it represents a "structural change" in how the world is confronting climate change and other environmental issues, such as pollution.

Science and policy have led the response to environmental concerns for decades, she said, but the pope has interjected a moral force linking people with their environment.

"It's not just social justice issues, and not just environmental issues," Tucker said. "It's the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, all coming together in various movements. The encyclical names this 'integral ecology'."

The global coronavirus pandemic, she added, "is making the linkages even more clear. You cannot have healthy people on a sick planet."

A Message for the Planet

To the world's 1.2 billion Catholics—including about 70 million in the United States—a papal encyclical is a pastoral letter that carries a special gravitas. But with Laudato Si', the pope intended it to reach everyone on the planet.

"The encyclical stands on millennia of Catholic teachings, starting with the Genesis story," said Anna Wagner, an engagement director with the five-year-old Global Catholic Climate Movement, which works with the Vatican on climate matters. "It takes ancient lessons of our faith and expresses them in a new way," she said.

Upon the encyclical's release in June, 2015, the pope took to Twitterto declare, bluntly: "The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth."

At the time, scientists were warning that global warming, rising seas, and supercharged weather were no longer a distant threat. Five years later, scientists have documented how climate change is intensifying droughts, wildfires and hurricanes, and have said that carbon emissions need to drop 45 percent by 2030 if the world is to have a chance at fending off the worst effects of climate change.

In Laudato Si', Francis blended the latest science on climate and the loss of biological diversity with a heavy dose of economics, Catholic teaching and a call to treat all humans with dignity and respect.

"Climate change is a global problem with grave implications," he wrote, especially for the poor and in developing nations.

Rich countries are hurting poor countries, Francis wrote, calling for an economic system with "more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations."

The encyclical was seen in some camps as an attack on capitalism, and it made some Catholic Republican leaders squirm, like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who in 2015 observed that the pope "is not a scientist."

The conservative Heartland Institute, which has long sought to undercut climate science, accused Francis of being misled by what a spokesman described as "false prophets," or the "agenda-driven bureaucrats at the United Nations."

Five years later, climate activist and journalist Bill McKibben, who has taught Sunday school in Methodist churches and hasbeen open about his own Christian faith, described the encyclical as among the most important documents of recent decades.

"It has its roots in the climate crisis, but it understands it in a much larger sense," McKibben said. "And it presages what has happened over the last four of five years as people realize that the environmental movement needs to be the environmental justice movement."

It's important, as well, McKibben said, because of the Pope's reach as a global faith leader and "arguably the most recognizable figure in the world."

The World's Response Has Been "a Source of Grave Concern"

Laudato Si' created a global buzz before and after it was published. But its impact has been mixed inside the sprawling church, a massive global institution known to move slowly.

The National Catholic Reporter, a Kansas City-based independent Catholic news outlet with dedicated climate coverage,found examples around the world in which individual Catholics, parishes and institutions had responded to Laudato Si'.

Bishops in the Philippines have been fighting coal-fired power plants. American Catholic nuns and their partners in Ghana launched a plastic recycling program to reduce waste and increase employment. The U.S. Conference of Bishops, citing Laudato Si', has opposed the Trump administration's rollback or repeals of key environmental regulations.

The Global Catholic Climate Movement is another example. Launched as Laudato Si' was released, it has grown to encompass 900 Catholic organizations in dozens of countries. The organization has spearheaded some of Catholicism's most visible climate actions, from faith-based youth climate strikes to persuading a growing number of Catholic institutions to pull their investments in fossil fuel companies.

But the National Catholic Reporter also concluded that the pope's message had not been as widely received as Francis had hoped.

"Sadly, the urgency of this ecological conversion seems not to have been grasped by international politics, where the response to the problems raised by global issues such as climate change remains very weak and a source of grave concern," the pope told 180 diplomats meeting at the Vatican in January. He alsopraised the rising voices of young people demanding urgent action on climate change.

This summer, the Vatican announced the "Laudato Si' Action Platform." It asks Catholics and Catholic institutions to achieve sustainability within seven years.

The Vatican itself continues to gather advice from high-level scientists and other experts in working groups, with both climate and Covid-19 in mind.

"The Vatican is pulling expertise from all over the world to chart a course for a post-Covid world," Tucker said. "This is a huge commitment."

The Importance of Catholic Divestment

Experts will argue over whether divestment campaigns actually cripple the targeted industries. But to their supporters, the campaigns hurt companies by diminishing their reputations and their access to capital, the lifeblood of any corporation.

In McKibben's mind, the Vatican's full support for divestment of fossil fuel companies is "a big deal, since the Church is a serious financial force."

Various Catholic institutions have been divesting from fossil fuel companies for several years, including the University of Dayton and Georgetown University, with the pace picking up since Laudato Si', though many still have not divested, he said.

The author of more than 15 books, including The End of Nature, published in 1989 as an early warning about global warming, McKibben is also co-founder of the environmental group350.org, which has run its own divestment campaign since 2012.

The environmental groupcounts more than 1,200 institutions and local governments and thousands of individuals representing over $14 trillion as having pledged to divest their assets from fossil fuels, including the Episcopal church, the Church of England, and the World Council of Churches.

S&P Global, a financial information and analysis company, has said the movement is gaining traction, and reported a new sense of clean-energy optimism in the market.

And, the multinational oil and gas company Royal Dutch Shell in its 2019 annual reportdescribed the divestment campaigns as a significant enough risk that it felt it needed to warn investors.

Divestment campaigns "could have a material adverse effect on the price of our securities and our ability to access capital markets," the company disclosed. Shell also recentlyslashed the value of its assets by up to $22 billion amid crashing oil prices, the global pandemic and pressure to move away from fossil fuels.

The Global Catholic Climate Movementcalled the new divestment effort the first-ever endorsement of a fossil fuel divestment campaign to come from the full Vatican and said it followed the largest-ever announcement of divestment by faith institutions. In May 2020, 42 institutions in 14 countries announced their commitment to drop fossil fuels.

"The more that banks and fossil fuel companies and insurance companies see investment in fossil fuels is a losing strategy, the more they are going to distance themselves from fossil fuel industry projects and see them as a losing strategy in terms of finances and risk," Wagner said.

Engaging Conservative Catholics

The pope's renewed climate push this year comes as Americans face a presidential election pitting two candidates with widely divergent views on climate change. For nearly four years, President Donald Trump has taken the country in the opposite direction from the Vatican, working to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a global action to fight climate change. Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden, a Catholic, has embraced the encyclical, as well as a $2 trillion clean economy jobs program and timetable to achieve net-zero carbon emissions no later than 2050.

For some Catholics, Trump's fossil-fuel agenda has provided motivation to act on their own, said Dan Misleh, executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant, a national nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. that includes 19 U.S. Catholic partner institutions and works to incorporate the encyclical's message in education and worship. "People were saying nothing is going to happen on the national level, so we need to act at the local and state level," he said.

The encyclical has inspired actions across the country, he said. His organization has encouraged the creation of dozens of so-called Creation Care Teams to lead community action. It has started Catholic Energies, focused on solar power and energy efficiency. And it is encouraging advocacy in state capitals and Washington, D.C. "It's made a difference and it's continued to unfold," Misleh said.

The Atlantaclimate action plan has been or is being used as a point of reference for climate plans at the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., where Archbishop Gregory now serves, and at dioceses in Boston, Columbus, Minneapolis, San Diego and elsewhere, Misleh and other Catholic leaders said.

But they acknowledged that there have been some dioceses and parishes less willing to embrace the climate fight due to competing priorities or resistance on political grounds. The Pew Research Centerfinds that Catholics are evenly split between Republicans and Democrats and polarized, generally.

Still, Misleh and other Catholics who are deeply concerned about climate change don't hesitate to engage Catholic conservatives who oppose abortion and reject the urgency to act on climate—a position not uncommon among Republicans.

"One cannot be concerned about the unborn and not be concerned about the world in which they are born into," said Michael Terrien, who works on climate issues with the Archdiocese of Chicago, which serves 2.2 million Catholics.

In Atlanta, the climate action plan Varmaloff helped write directly replies to the suggestion that the encyclical runs counter to business, a common refrain in the South. Business is a "noble vocation," the plan says, but it adds that Francis is asking for "is a future in which 'all people can prosper personally and economically in harmony with the gifts God has given us in nature.'"

The Atlanta Archdiocese has been able to perform or schedule energy audits on about two dozen of its 103 parishes so far. St. Mary's Catholic School in Rome, Georgia, for example, has 1,500 new energy-saving LED lights, cutting gym energy use in half, said Brian J. Savoie, the archdiocese sustainability program coordinator.

He said he has a simple message as he works with the parishes on energy efficiency: "Stop wasting, save money and fix the environmental burden."

Spending less on heating, air conditioning and lighting leaves more money to go toward social justice work, like feeding and clothing the poor, said Kat Doyle, who heads up the Laudato Si' initiative for the Atlanta Archdiocese.

"We want to tie all of this climate and energy work into how we are serving the least among us," she said. "We have to change hearts first, then we have to change minds, and then we have to change behaviors."

And, she said, Catholics must answer the question, "What does our faith call us to do?"

PUBLISHED UNDER:

icn

Pope Francis's Climate Encyclical: Next Comes the Hard Part

BY KATHERINE BAGLEY AND LISA SONG

Pope Francis Unlikely to Sway Catholic Republicans on Climate Change

BY KATHERINE BAGLEY

Pope Francis, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner, waves to the crowd at the Capitol.

Pope Francis to Congress: Act on Issues of Life and Death, Including Climate

BY KATHERINE BAGLEY

Pope Francis arrives at the United Nations on Friday.

Pope Francis to UN: Climate Key to Sustainable Development

BY KATHERINE BAGLEY

Pat Robertson linked the COVID-19 pandemic to marriage equality and abortion.
An OAN host claimed that the COVID-19 death count is inflated and that hospitals are “fudging the numbers.”
Tucker Carlson argued that Trump's immigration ban doesn’t go far enough. Carlson also said that “The threat to rural America from this virus is minuscule.”
Ben Shapiro slammed Pope Francis for promoting “pagan holiday” Earth Day.
On Fox News, Mike Huckabee and his guest suggested that the coronavirus is a Chinese bioweapon.
A Fox host said that states must end restrictions “everywhere as quickly as possible” because COVID-19 is “only terrible for a very small group of people”.
Fox News hosted Dinesh D’Souza after he spread a conspiracy theory about coronavirus death counts.

1219 dn also blk friday materialism

NOV 25, 2019

Pope Francis Calls Nuclear Weapons Immoral as Catholic Activists Face Jail For U.S. Nuke Base Action

Pope Francis convenes an unprecedented meeting at the Vatican, bringing together Catholic bishops from around the world, climate experts and indigenous people to discuss the destruction underway in the Amazon rainforest. It pits two of the most powerful forces in Brazil against one another: the Catholic Church and President Jair Bolsonaro.

Also, U.S. courts are starting to question the authority of natural gas pipeline builders to take land under eminent domain, Trump’s EPA loses a fight over interstate smog, and a look at how Britain ended its coal addiction.

With Amazon Burning, Pope Convenes Meeting on Rainforests Climate Change & Moral Obligation

Francis Declares Climate Emergency in Meeting With Big Oil Leaders

Bannon v. Pope Francis: Here’s how the Trump ally and former Breitbart exec is trying to push the Catholic Church to the far right

Alex Henderson

target b/c of climate and inequality

With Amazon Burning, Pope Convenes Meeting on Rainforests Climate Change & Moral Obligation

Francis Declares Climate Emergency in Meeting With Big Oil Leaders

Bannon v. Pope Francis: Here’s how the Trump ally and former Breitbart exec is trying to push the Catholic Church to the far right

Alex Henderson

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 82-year-old Buenos Aires native best known as Pope Francis, has been the most liberal pope in the history of the Catholic Church. There are some areas…

Controversial Australian Climate Science Denier Cardinal George Pell Removed from Vatican Advisory Group

cf nebraska ricketts

Megachurch Pastor Robert Jeffress, a Fox News contributor, got a Bible lesson from the Internet over the weekend after he lashed out at Pope Francis for opposing the death penalty.

In a declaration last week, the Vatican said that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”

On Sunday, Jeffress complained about the Catholic Church’s stance.

“Pope Francis is dead wrong about capital punishment,” he wrote on Twitter. “God has commanded government to use the death penalty to demonstrate the seriousness of murder.”

Jeffress went on to quote the book of Genesis: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.”

https://www.alternet.org/local-peace-economy/why-vatican-meeting-larry-fink

pope’s June 9 meeting with Larry Fink—CEO of the investment firm BlackRock—and other executives on the issue of climate change couldn’t be more timely. Back in 2015, the pope issued an encyclical on climate change, highlighting that unchecked consumption and greed cause massive devastation to our planet. The pope has repeatedly brought climate change to the forefront of international discussions, including connecting the issue of worldwide hunger with war and climate change.

Forced migrations, hunger, water pollution/scarcity, increased poaching, escalating global insecurity, and the lack of political will to find sustainable solutions are just a few of the common connections between war and climate change. Considering the countless conflicts that have raged across the world and the continued threat of climate change, it’s well past time to hold institutions accountable for profiting on the backs of global destruction.

In October 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink announced that he was going to start holding companies accountable to be good corporate citizens. BlackRock is the world’s largest investment firm, controlling more than $3 trillion in assets. Some of these assets are linked to weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, meaning that Mr. Fink should follow his own advice and set an example for Wall Street. C ODEPINK has been calling on BlackRock to stop investing in weapons of war. There should be no profit in war (or climate destruction). The pope has been meeting with financial and oil executives because their leadership is needed to pull us out of a spiraling climate crisis. We also recommend that the pope speak to corporate leadership about ending war, as it compounds and escalates the impacts of climate change. In the pope’s 2015 Climate Encyclical he states, “The environment is one of those goods that cannot be adequately safeguarded or promoted by market forces.”

Peace, like the environment, should not be dictated by market forces. When a company’s bottom line is driving decisions, its executives are not considering the impacts of their products on others. BlackRock invests in companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. These companies make the bombs, missiles, tanks, and warplanes that destroy other communities. Their legacy of environmental contamination includes polluting groundwater and leaving behind depleted uranium in soil for generations.

The legacy of war and climate change also includes the destruction of families. Whether through forced migrations or death, families are ripped apart. Pope Francis raised the issue of refugees and forced migrations during his 2018 World Peace Day address. There are over 65 million forcibly displaced people in the world. U.S. military interventions and U.S. produced weapons have played a leading role in displacing millions around the globe. Conservative estimates state that since 2001, U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have displaced 10 million people.

The impacts of war and climate change disproportionately impact those who have less, while an elite few let profits drive their decisions and line their pocketbooks. This is why we must Divest From War and invest in solutions like renewable energy. Our investments—personal and public—should reflect the needs and priorities of our local communities, not the bottom lines of Wall Street.

Learn more about how you can be a part of the solution at www.divestfromwarmachine.org.

https://www.alternet.org/pope-francis-says-continued-use-fossil-fuels-will-destroy-civilization

during a closed-door meeting with oil executives at the Vatican on Saturday, Pope Francis gravely warned against further fossil fuel exploration and extraction, arguing that continued use of dirty energy could ultimately "destroy civilization."

"Carbon dioxide emissions remain very high. This is disturbing and a cause for real concern," Francis said in an address at the close of a two-day conference titled Energy Transition and Care of Our Common Home. "More worrying is the continued search for new fossil fuel reserves, whereas the Paris Agreement clearly urged keeping most fossil fuels underground."

In attendance at the conference were several major players in the oil and gas industry, according to Reuters, including ExxonMobil and Shell—both of whichdenied the reality of climate change in public for decades despite knowing privately about the threat soaring carbon emissions posed to the planet.

A total of fifty industry executives were reportedly in attendance at the two-day event.

Denouncing "unlimited faith in markets and technology" exuded by corporate executives in an effort to justify the disastrous status quo, the pontiff argued that a just transition to clean, renewable energy is "a duty that we owe towards millions of our brothers and sisters around the world, poorer countries, and generations yet to come."

"We know that the challenges facing us are interconnected. If we are to eliminate poverty and hunger...the more than one billion people without electricity today need to gain access to it," Francis said.

"Our desire to ensure energy for all must not lead to the undesired effect of a spiral of extreme climate changes due to a catastrophic rise in global temperatures, harsher environments, and increased levels of poverty," he added

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/watch-fox-business-ludicrously-attack-pope-francis-promoting-authoritarian

...VARNEY (HOST): I've got two problems with this. Number one, this document approved personally by the Pope, is part -- it came from the Catholic doctrine, (comma) the Vatican's office for Catholic doctrine. Do we now believe that authoritarian socialism is part of Catholic doctrine? I've got a problem with that. Number two, I don't want to see politics. When I go to church on a Sunday, and I'm a believer, I go -- I don't want to hear politics from the pulpit. I just don't want to hear it. So I'm like, save my soul, not my vote.

ELIZABETH MACDONALD (FOX BUSINESS STOCKS EDITOR): And what did Jesus say, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," right?

...

https://www.alternet.org/media/pope-fake-news-sin

https://www.ecowatch.com/faith-institutions-divest-2492836438.html

Record Fossil Fuel Divestment Announced by Catholic Church

Wednesday, a coalition of 40 faith institutions on five continents have jointly just announced their divestment from fossil fuels. This is a big moment for both the global divestment movement and faith community, and we need to keep this momentum going strong.

This commitment well and truly quadruples the one announced in May, when nine Catholic organizations divested. We need to celebrate it and also seize the opportunity to build upon this moment.

In the words of Domenico Sorrentino, the bishop of Assisi-Nocera Umbra-Gualdo Tadino:

St. Francis (Pope Francis) encouraged us to live humbly, simply, and with true reverence for the Creator and Creation. Divesting from fossil fuels and making new investments in clean energy sources is our way of following St. Francis's example.

Pope Francis has prominently voiced his concerns about climate change and the fossil fuel industry. But while Vatican officials have acknowledged the call for fossil fuel divestment, the Vatican has not committed to divest its money from the industry that is destroying Creation—yet.

In the wake of this announcement, people from all over the world are uniting during the Season of Creation and urging the World Bank to stop financing fossil fuels and support for renewable energy instead. Please join and add your voice to the global call.

Now more than ever we need institutions to stand together on the right side of history against an immoral industry whose climate impacts we see and experience daily.

As we celebrate this inspiring show of moral leadership, let's make sure the World Bank puts its mouth where its money is and stops funding the fossil fuel industry and climate disasters.

A full list of all the institutions which have divested as part of this commitment can be found here.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08092017/hurricane-irma-harvey-climate-change-denial-pruitt-perry-limbaugh-texas-florida

...In the wake of the storms, Pope Francis and other leaders urged officials who deny the reality of climate change to open their eyes. "You can see the effects of climate change with your own eyes, and scientists tell us clearly the way forward," Pope Francis said Monday, stressing that leaders have a "moral responsiblity" to act. But "when you don't want to see, you don't see," he said. "History will judge those decisions." Miami's Republican mayor also called on President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to acknowledge the role of climate change, saying "If this isn't climate change, I don't know what is."

But steadfast opponents of action on global warming are either sticking to their guns or avoiding comment, while Trump administration officials declared it inappropriate to discuss climate amid tragedy.

Texas politicians have been particularly silent on climate change's tie to the storm that ravaged their state. InsideClimate News received no response from Texas' two senators, Republicans Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, or from Congressmen representing districts on the southeast coast that were affected by Harvey. The Washington Post also obtained no direct answer to a similar query to all 38 members of the Texas delegation.

Only Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science Committee, responded to the Post, by pointing to a CNN interview in which Bill Read, former director of the National Hurricane Center, said there was nothing uncommon about storms intensifying in the Gulf of Mexico. (Climate scientists would agree with Read, but they say that warmer air and oceans will, indeed, fuel more dangerous storms.) Another frequent argument is that the U.S. had been in a "hurricane drought" without "major hurricanes" for 12 years. (Researchers point out that that period included both Hurricane Ike and Superstorm Sandy.)

...

http://www.alternet.org/belief/vatican-fires-shot-us-religious-right-calls-out-religious-liberty-industry-and-evangelical

An article being described as “explosive,” written by two allies of Pope Francis in a Vatican-reviewed publication, is taking on the “spurious alliance between politics and religious fundamentalism” in the United States.

Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa call out the dominionist groups“composed mainly of whites from the deep American South” for their rejection of the “global ecological crisis” and their Armageddon-infused rhetoric, pointedly drawing parallels to Islamic fundamentalism.

They accuse these evangelical fundamentalists of seeking “influence in the political and parliamentary sphere and in the juridical and educational areas so that public norms can be subjected to religious morals.”

And, they name names:

This is the doctrine that feeds political organizations and networks such as the Council for National Policy and the thoughts of their exponents such as Steve Bannon, currently chief strategist at the White House and supporter of an apocalyptic geopolitics.

But it’s not just evangelical fundamentalists who desire “religious influence in the public sphere”:

Appealing to the values of fundamentalism, a strange form of surprising ecumenism is developing between Evangelical fundamentalists and Catholic Integralists. . . . Some who profess themselves to be Catholic express themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals. They are defined as value voters as far as attracting electoral mass support is concerned. . . . This meeting over shared objectives happens around such themes as abortion, same-sex marriage, religious education in schools and other matters generally considered moral or tied to values.

More than 15 years after the Catholic bishops helped get George W. Bush elected president and nearly eight after the signing of the Manhattan Declaration, the Vatican has discovered what had become the defining feature of the Christian Right in America: the conservative evangelical-Catholic convergence.

And while Spadaro and Figueroa are critical of the sublimation of gospel values to the goal of right-wing political domination, it’s worth noting that the two issues that drove this convergence in the first place—abortion and same-sex marriage—haven’t exactly been abandoned by Pope Francis.

As for the “glue” that holds this altogether—and formed the underpinning of the Manhattan Declaration coalition—Francis has been a proponent of the idea that the “religious liberty” of Catholics is under attackin western democracies such as the United States, even as Spadaro and Figueroa criticize its use for political ends:

The erosion of religious liberty is clearly a grave threat within a spreading secularism. But we must avoid its defense coming in the fundamentalist terms of a “religion in total freedom,” perceived as a direct virtual challenge to the secularity of the state.

While much of their criticism is justified, Spadaro and Figueroa are silent about the role that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict played in the creation of the “evangelical Catholics” they complain about and about the role that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops played in driving conservative Catholics into the arms of the Republican Party, and, eventually, Trump.

Nonetheless, they correctly call-out the “shocking rhetoric” of the Church Militant and other pro-Trump organizations that are “openly in favor of a political ultraconservatism and uses Christian symbols to impose itself”

. . . it has created a close analogy between Donald Trump and Emperor Constantine, and between Hilary Clinton and Diocletian. The American elections in this perspective were seen as a “spiritual war” . . . Church Militant asks if Trump’s victory can be attributed to the prayers of Americans. The response suggested is affirmative. The indirect missioning for President Trump is clear: he has to follow through on the consequences. This is a very direct message that then wants to condition the presidency by framing it as a divine election. For conservatives, however, this is not political warfare cloaked as spiritual warfare, but a logical and necessary outcome of attacks on the traditional church. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput The cooperation of Catholics and evangelicals was quite rare when I was a young priest. Their current mutual aid, the ecumenism that seems to worry La Civilta Cattolica, is a function of shared concerns and principles, not ambition for political power. . . . Dismissing today’s attacks on religious liberty as a “narrative of fear”—as the La Civiltà Cattolica author curiously describes it—might have made sense 25 years ago. Now it sounds willfully ignorant. It also ignores the fact that America’s culture wars weren’t wanted, and weren’t started, by people faithful to constant Christian belief.

But Spadaro and Figueroa call this a false ecumenism, “an ecumenism of conflict that unites them in the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state” and that “wants walls and purifying deportations.” By contrast, they say, Francis’ ecumenism “moves under the urge of inclusion, peace, encounter and bridges.”

Regardless of whose brand of ecumenism you subscribe to, one thing is for sure. Francis, they say, “wants to break the organic link between culture, politics, institution and Church.” But this link underpins much of the conservative religious understanding in the United States today. And breaking it may take more than just words.

Steve Bannon vs. Pope Francis? - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/...**bannon**...**pope**-**francis**/.../4d6e44dc-ee47-11e6-b4ff-...

Feb 8, 2017 - Will he disrupt the Roman Catholic Church by joining forces with right-wing Catholics who oppose Pope Francis? Bannon's dark vision ...

Stephen K. Bannon disrupted American politics and helped elect Donald Trump as president. Will he disrupt the Roman Catholic Church by joining forces with right-wing Catholics who oppose Pope Francis?

Bannon’s dark vision contrasts sharply with the sunny disposition of a pope who has chided “sourpusses” and “querulous and disillusioned pessimists.”

Bannon believes that “the Judeo-Christian West is in a crisis.” He calls for a return of “the church militant” who will “fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity,” which threatens to “completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”

Where Francis has insisted on dialogue with Muslims, Bannon points to “the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam” and reaches as far back as the eighth century to praise “forefathers” who defeated Islam on the battlefield and “kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places.”

“See what’s happening,” Bannon insists, “and you will see we’re in a war of immense proportions.”

Pope issues stinging criticism of Burma's treatment of Rohingyas Embed Share Play Video1:05

The pope has issued a strong criticism of Burma's treatment of the minority Rohingya people. (Reuters)

Bannon offered these comments in 2014 to the Institute for Human Dignity, an ultra-traditionalist group based in Rome and allied with some of Francis’s sharpest internal critics. They include Cardinal Raymond Burke, who has been so tough on Francis that he had to deny he was accusing the pontiff of heresy.

[‘What happens to us?’ Why Sweden is so worried about the Trump administration.]

The New York Times’ Jason Horowitz put Bannon’s Catholic project front and center this week with a Page 1 story reporting that during a 2014 visit to Rome for the canonizations of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII, Bannon met and “bonded” with Burke.

Neither Bannon nor Trump (nor, for that matter, Burke) is likely to dent Francis’s immense popularity with American Catholics. But Horowitz’s story brought into relief the struggle inside the church — and particularly within American Catholicism — over the pope’s stewardship, his emphasis on battling poverty, his insistence on the importance of welcoming immigrants and refugees, and his relative openness to modernity.

Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and a close student of the Vatican, argues that Francis has aroused a similar hostility among some on the Catholic right to that Barack Obama called forth on the right end of politics generally. Francis is the first pope from Latin America, and his vision of economics is inflected by his experiences there. Moreover, Francis accepts the reforming Second Vatican Council in the 1960s “in its entirety and is not just paying lip service.”

The vast majority of conservative American bishops and Catholic thinkers have, of course, pledged their allegiance to the pope. But Faggioli argues that many of them are often critical of Francis’s attitude toward doctrine (the pope, he says, is “pastoral, not ideological”) and toward Vatican II’s reforms, which shifted church teaching toward a greater respect for religious pluralism.

On the surface, some of Bannon’s economic views would seem to match Francis’s. In his speech broadcast to the group in Rome, Bannon spoke against “a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people.”...

no lonk

http://www.gmwatch.org/news/latest-news/16239-pope-francis-slams-gmos-and-pesticides-for-environmental-and-social-damage

Pope Francis slams both GMOs and pesticides in a draft of his major environmental document that was leaked Monday. He has also called for independent and interdisciplinary research to study GMOs

Pope Francis’s open-eyed vision of the problems caused by GMOs and pesticides in the articles below is in stark contrast with the ludicrous hype generated by GMO proponents in 2013 around the Pope giving “his personal blessing” to GMO golden rice.

In fact it was far from clear if he knew exactly what he was blessing and this act cannot be claimed to be an endorsement of this GMO or GMOs in general.

It’s evident from the second article below that Pope Francis will not fall for the lie that we need GMOs to feed the world. He states that the problem of hunger could be solved through political will and tackling food speculation and food waste.

Pope Francis slams GMOs and pesticides for environmental and social damage

Pope Francis: We can end world hunger if we want to

—

Pope Francis slams GMOs and pesticides for environmental and social damage

Sustainable Pulse, Jun 16 2015

http://sustainablepulse.com/2015/06/16/pope-francis-slams-gmos-and-pesticides-for-environmental-and-social-damage/#.VX_cHufWlnc

* Pope Francis slams both GMOs and pesticides in a draft of his major environmental document that was leaked Monday. He has also called for the financing of independent and interdisciplinary research to study GMOs

On the subject of GMOs Pope Francis states, “It is difficult to give an overall judgment on the development of genetically modified organisms (GMO), plant or animal, for medical purposes or in agriculture, since they can be very different and require different considerations.”

He continues, “Although we do not have definitive evidence about the damage that transgenic cereals could cause to humans, and in some regions their use has produced economic growth that has helped solve some problems, there are significant problems that should not be minimized. In many areas, following the introduction of these crops, there has been a concentration of productive land in the hands of the few, due to the gradual disappearance of small producers, who, as a consequence of the loss of cultivated land, have been forced to retreat from direct production.

“The most fragile among them become temporary workers and many farm workers migrate to end up in miserable urban settlements. The spread of these (GM) crops destroys the complex web of ecosystems, decreases diversity in production and affects the present and the future of regional economies. In several countries there is a trend in the development of oligopolies in the production of seeds and other products needed for cultivation, and the dependence deepens when you consider the production of sterile seeds, which end up forcing farmers to buy (seeds) from producers.”

“No doubt there is a need for constant attention…to consider all ethical aspects involved. To this end it is necessary to ensure a scientific and social debate that is responsible and large, able to consider all the information available and to call things by their names.

“GMOs is an issue which is complex, it must be approached with a sympathetic look at all its aspects, and this requires at least one more effort to finance several lines of independent and interdisciplinary research… as we have seen in this chapter, the technique is unlikely to be able to …self-limit its power.”

On pesticides Pope Francis states, “We get sick, for example, due to inhalation of large amounts of smoke produced by fuels used for cooking and heating. This is added to by….fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and toxic pesticides in general. Technology that is linked to finance, claims to be only solving problems…this solves a problem by creating others.

“It creates a vicious circle in which the intervention of the human being to solve a problem often worsens the situation further. For example, many birds and insects die out as a result of toxic pesticides created by technology, they are useful to agriculture itself, and their disappearance will be compensated with another technological intervention that probably will bring new harmful effects… looking at the world we see that this level of human intervention, often in the service of finance and consumerism, actually causes the earth we live in to become less rich and beautiful, more and more limited and gray, while at the same time the development of technology and consumerism continues to advance without limits.”

You can find the full draft document here (in Italian): speciali.espresso.repubblica.it/pdf/laudato_si.pdf

Pope Francis: We can end world hunger if we want to

Mark Woods

Christian Today, 12 June 2015

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/pope.francis.we.can.end.world.hunger.if.we.want.to/56045.htm

Pope Francis has called for a new focus on global hunger in a major address to delegates from the international Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.

In a hard-hitting speech, he warned against the tendency to "delegate" and "desert" in the face of the problem. He spoke of a "generic resignation" and "indifference" to hunger, as if it were unavoidable. "Sometimes one has the sensation that hunger is an unpopular topic, an insoluble problem," he said.

However, Francis argued that a lack of will was behind the continuing lack of food security in many parts of the world and said that it was possible to tackle the issue.

He instanced food speculation, responsible for high prices that hit the poor hardest. The products of the earth "have a value that we can say is 'sacred', given that they are the fruit of the daily work of persons, families, communities of farmers – a work that is often dominated by uncertainties, worries over climatic conditions, anxieties over the possible destruction of the harvest", he said.

He also spoke of the shocking waste of food – standing at around a third of everything produced globally – and said it was important to reflect on the use of crops for biofuels and feeding animals: "It is worrying to know that a good quantity of agricultural products is used for other ends, perhaps good ends, but which are not the immediate need of one who is hungry."

Francis also warned against "monopolising of lands of cultivation by trans-national enterprises and states, which not only deprives farmers of an essential good, but which directly affects the sovereignty of countries". "There are already many regions in which the foods produced go to foreign countries and the local population is doubly impoverished, because it does not have food or land," he said.

"And what to say of the women who in many areas cannot possess the land they work, with an inequality of rights that impedes the serenity of family life, because the danger is run of losing the field from one moment to the other?" Most food production, he argued, was "in the main the work of family properties". He urged the FAO to support small-scale family enterprises through lobbying for better legislation.

The Pope urged a commitment to simpler lifestyles that would mean fewer resources were consumed, saying: "We must begin from our daily life if we want to change lifestyles, conscious that our little gestures can ensure sustainability and the future of the human family."

He concluded: "Let us modify our relation with the natural resources, the use of the soil, let us modify our consumption, without falling into the slavery of consumerism; let us eliminate waste and thus we will overcome hunger."

In another sign of the Pope's commitment to the poor, he is to open a homeless shelter on the edge of Vatican City in Rome. The shelter, which is still under construction, will host 30 people at a time and will be run by volunteers. It follows an earlier initiative to provide showers, haircuts and shaves under the colonnade of St Peter's Square.

Earlier this month Francis donated money to allow two busloads of poor people to travel from Rome to see the Shroud of Turin. He has also invited homeless people to a private viewing of the Vatican museums and the Sistine Chapel.

http://www.ecowatch.com/pope-francis-climate-change-1995225094.html

Destroying the environment is a sin, Pope Francis said in a message from Vatican City.

"Global warming continues," the pontiff said in a message released Thursday. "2015 was thewarmest year on record, and 2016 will likely be warmer still. This is leading to even more severedroughts, floods, fires, and extreme weather events."

He would like "caring for the environment" to be added to the traditional Christian works of mercy, which also include visiting the sick and feeding the hungry. The pope last year declared 2016 to be the "Year of Mercy," and urged Catholics to meditate on how they could reflect the love of God in the world.

He tied environmental concerns to the growing global migrant crisis.

"Climate change is also contributing to the heart-rending refugee crisis," he said. "The world's poor, though least responsible for climate change, are the most vulnerable and already suffering its impact."

Catholics should use this year to reflect upon sins they may have committed against the environment, and also urged forgiveness for the "selfish" capitalist system which advocates "profit at any price."

5/16 huffpo

Pope Francis isn’t mincing words in his latest denouncement of those who exploit the poor.

The pontiff was in his element during a passionate sermon at the Vatican on Thursday, berating rich employers who hire and fire poor people with callous disregard for their workers’ wellbeing, and who refuse to give their employees health care, pensions, or vacations.

He called people who take advantage of the poor in this way “true bloodsuckers” who “live by spilling the blood of the people who they make slaves of labor.”

Although some may think slavery no longer exists, Francis insisted that it is still a problem around the world.

“It’s true, people no longer go to Africa to capture [slaves] in order to sell them in America, no. But it is in our cities. And there are these traffickers, these people who treat the working people without justice,” Francis said in his sermon. “This is a mortal sin. And this demands a great deal of penance, a great deal of restitution, in order to be converted from this sin.”

In particular, Francis recalled the story of a young girl who told him that she worked for 11 hours a day for 650 euro a month, all under the table. Her employers reminded her that she could leave if she couldn’t handle the terms of the job — there were plenty of others like her who would do the work instead.

Paraphrasing the Bible passage for the day, taken from James 5, the pope said: “The blood of all these people that you have sucked [and on which] you have lived, is a cry to the Lord, it is a cry of justice.”

In a similar vein, Francis also slammed the “theology of prosperity,” which he said is the belief that “God shows you that you are just if He give you great riches.”

Televangelists have been preaching the prosperity gospel for decades in America. According to Religion News Service, this theology is popular in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Proponents of this gospel promise their flock that God wants Christians to prosper financially, stay healthy, and live comfortably — as long as they have the right kind of faith.

Some critics have said that the prosperity gospel preys on the poor who are encouraged to donate money to churches with the promise that the investment will result in an abundance of wealth or miraculous healings later on.

Pope Francis insisted that people who believe in this theology have the wrong idea because it encourages them to become too attached to material goods.

“You cannot serve both God and riches,” Francis said during the sermon.

Pope Francis has often spoken up about the “idolatry of money“ and the evils of economic systems that treats people like commodities.

In the end, Francis left his listeners with a poignant metaphor about the importance of helping others:

“A glass of water in the name of Christ is more important than all the riches accumulated through the exploitation of the people.”

Pope Francis's Theory of Economics

A case for the pontiff's debt not to Karl Marx but to Karl Polanyi

Pope Francis and, clockwise from top left: Keynes, Polanyi, Hayek, and Marx (Reuters/Giampiero Sposito/Wikimedia Commons)

It would make for some pretty amazing headlines if Pope Francis turned out to be a Marxist.

Between his hints at rehabilitatingliberation theology—condemned by his predecessors—and talk about casting off "the economic and social structures that enslave us," Marxism isn't totally out of the question.

rush etc fox marxist

https://www.facebook.com/Mediamatters/videos/vb.26595441166/10153193908191167/

beck team will teach pope;danger, occupy alex jones; outlier:

ox Contributor Calls Out Host's "Absolutely Astounding" Selective Hearing On Pope's Call To Action On Climate Change

Father Jonathan Morris: It Is The Pope's Job To Say "Climate Change Is A Moral Issue Because It's Going To Affect Mostly The Poor

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/13/pope-francis-rise-up-global-capitalism

http://www.alternet.org/environment/dalai-lama-endorses-pope-francis-climate-change-encyclical

http://www.alternet.org/environment/george-lakoff-why-pope-francis-killed-it-addressing-climate-change

Pope combines science, morality and politics.

By George Lakoff / AlterNet July 1, 2015

Beginning with my book Moral Politics in 1996 (Ch. 12), I have been arguing that environmental issues are moral issues. There I reviewed and critiqued conservative metaphors of nature as a resource, as property, as an adversary to be conquered.

Instead I argued that we needed to conceptualize nature as the giver of all life, as sustainer and provider, as having inherent value, imposing responsibility, and deserving gratitude, love, adoration, and commitment.

I suggested alternative metaphors of nature as mother, as a divine being, as a living organism, as a home, as a victim to be cared for, and a whole with us as parts inseparable from nature and from each other.

Pope Francis in his Encyclical used all of these and then went much further. First, he got all the science right -- no small task. I have been writing for some time about role of systemic causation in global warming and the environment. The Pope not only got the ecological system effects right, but he went much, much further linking the environmental effects to effects on those most oppressed on earth by poverty, weather disasters, disease, ocean rise, lack of drinking water, the degradation of agriculture, and the essential aesthetic and spiritual contact with unspoiled nature. And more, he spoke of our moral responsibility toward animals.

He spoke in metaphors that might sound strange coming in a scientific or political speech, but somehow seem entirely natural for the Pope.

The title of the encyclical is "On Care for our Common Home." This simple phrase establishes the most important frame right from the start. Using the metaphor of the "Earth as Home," he triggers a frame in which all the people of the world are a family, living in a common home.

This frame carries with it many assumptions: As one family, we should care for each other and take responsibility for each other. A home is something we all depend on, physically and emotionally. A home is something inherently worth maintaining and protecting.

"...there has been a growing conviction that our planet is a homeland and that humanity is one people living in a common home."

"...our common home is falling into serious disrepair."

"Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home."

Pope Francis explicitly states what most progressives implicitly believe but rarely say out loud: "The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all." The "Common Good" frame is about interdependence, shared responsibility and shared benefit.

Human ecology is inseparable from the notion of the common good, a central and unifying principle of social ethics.

Society as a whole, and the state in particular, are obliged to defend and promote the common good.

Critics of Pope Francis have attacked him as having a naïve understanding of the economy, of being anti-technology, or of denying the so-called productive role of self-interest. But he is doing much more, suggesting that business and technology can, and ought to, have moral ends, especially in the face of the looming worldwide disaster of global warming. He is further pointing out, correctly, that the global warming disaster and hugely disastrous other effects were created by the business-technology axis seeking profit above all, without being structured to serve the common good.

Business is a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving our world. It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the areas in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.

The alliance between the economy and technology ends up sidelining anything unrelated to its immediate interests.

The Pope of course realizes the challenge. An alternative religion of market fundamentalism has taken hold both in public discourse and in the minds of the public -- so much so that it is hard to imagine a change in time to avert disaster.

The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable.

Indeed, market fundamentalism has become a kind of alternative religion, with its own idea of what is natural (the primacy of self-interest) and moral (in the conservative version of the Invisible Hand metaphor, if everyone pursues his own profit, the profit of all will be maximized). Pope Francis correctly points out that these metaphors have run wild, "ending up" creating enormous wealth for some, disaster for the many, and the terror of global warming for the earth. In market fundamentalism, there is only "individual responsibility," no common responsibility for the common good. Without such common responsibility, there will be no way to avert the coming disasters of global warming, which has been created by market fundamentalism and will be perpetuated by it, unless it is checked.

In market fundamentalism, wealth is measure of the good: an overall increase in monetary wealth is a moral triumph. But while the industrialization of China has increased the wealth of China's capitalists, of American corporate outsourcers to China, and of the Chinese government, the Chinese have suffered an ecological and social devastation, an overwhelming "cost" -- a cost beyond the measure of money. Just look at the pollution in Beijing and desertification in western China. Via global warming, they are imposing that cost on the world, just as the industrialization of the West has in the past.

Pope Francis extends his view of morality using the commonplace economic metaphor of "Moral Accounting" in which there are debts, costs, people who owe, people who are owed, and an expectation that debts should be paid. He points out that no one makes it on his own, that pre-existing resources, often taken from others and the labor of others, have made life possible for anyone who is economically well-off. We all have debts. We also all have basic rights, e.g., to human dignity. When market fundamentalism shifts the resources of others and fruits of the labor of others to the wealthy, robbing the poor of their right to dignity, the wealthy incur a debt, a moral debt.

Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. This debt can be paid partly by an increase in funding to provide clean water and sanitary services among the poor.

A true "ecological debt" exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time.

The Portuguese bishops have called upon us to acknowledge this obligation of justice: "The environment is part of a logic of receptivity. It is on loan to each generation, which must then hand it on to the next."

These are just a few examples of the many metaphors and frames used to powerful effect in this document. They have one thing in common, which they also share with the progressive value system: they are rooted in a worldview based on empathy.

This is Empathy writ large, beyond individual empathy: it is a global empathy for all humanity, all of life -- animals, fish, plants, and Nature, which provides all life. What is absent is the all too common narrow view of religion as about individuals alone, in which THE spiritual issue is whether YOU get into Heaven, and that is a matter of personal responsibility. You are responsible for yourself, not for others, not for all of life and what is life-giving. That narrow view of individual, not social or global responsibility is completely absent from the Pope's message. The message takes morality to the global level, to an ecological spirituality. It is a message especially appropriate for American democracy, which begins with the idea of union, of citizens caring for one another and taking the responsibility working through their government to provide public resources for all, whether for business or personal life, and with freedom and dignity for all as inalienable rights.

The whole Encyclical is well worth reading. It is a remarkable document and one that needs to be taken to heart not just by the world's Catholics, but by the world's full population, now and for many years into the future.

I am an advocate of the separation of church and state. I don't have a Pope. I have never tended to follow the edicts of a Pope just because he was Pope. And I am not doing so here.

It is vital to bear in mind that this Encyclical is not just a matter of church doctrine. All policy within the political domain is a matter of morality. Every politician who proposes a policy does so on the basis that it is right, not wrong or morally irrelevant. This Encyclical is overtly about politics and the role a global morality needs to play in politics.

I have long argued that global warming is the moral issue of our time. President Obama has said the same. I am thrilled that Pope Francis, spiritual and moral leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, has not just agreed, but has gone so much further, and that he has framed the issue so powerfully, often in language that flows most easily and readily from a Pope, and yet makes so much moral sense, whether you are Catholic or not, religious or not.

Moral questions are not the same as practical questions. But the fate of the earth in the face of global warming is so practical a question that it becomes a moral one. That is the lens through which to read the Pope's Encyclical.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/02/naomi-klein-people-planet-first/

...

It’s also a real honour to be here supporting and indeed celebrating the historic publication of the Pope’s encyclical.

Pope Francis writes early on that Laudato Si’ is not only a teaching for the Catholic world but for “every person living on this planet.” And I can say that as a secular Jewish feminist who was rather surprised to be invited to the Vatican, it certainly spoke to me.

“We are not God,” the encyclical states. All humans once knew this. But about 400 years ago, dizzying scientific breakthroughs made it seem to some that humans were on the verge of knowing everything there was to know about the Earth, and would therefore be nature’s “masters and possessors,” as René Descartes so memorably put it. This, they claimed, was what God had always wanted.

That theory held for a good long time. But subsequent breakthroughs in science have told us something very different. Because when we were burning ever larger amounts of fossil fuels—convinced that our container ships and jumbo jets had leveled the world, that we were as gods—greenhouse gases were accumulating in the atmosphere and relentlessly trapping heat.

And now we are confronted with the reality that we were never the master, never that boss—and that we are unleashing natural forces that are far more powerful than even our most ingenious machines. We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature—respecting and harnessing its intrinsic capacity for renewal and regeneration.

And this brings us to the core message of interconnection at the heart of the encyclical. Whatclimate change reaffirms—for that minority of the human species that ever forgot—is that there is no such thing as a one-way relationship of pure mastery in nature. As Pope Francis writes, “Nothing in this world is indifferent to us.”

For some who see interconnection as a cosmic demotion, this is all too much to bear. And so—actively encouraged by fossil-fuel funded political actors—they choose to deny the science.....

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/climate-politics-and-the-disruption-of-conservative-orthodoxy/

UFFINGTON POST, BY CARL POPE, SIERRA CLUB

The Republican reaction to Pope Francis’s climate encyclical, juxtaposed to the Democratic congressional rebellion against President Obama on trade, suggest that climate and energy are powerfully disrupting the grid-locked orthodoxy which has dominated American politics for the last decade.

The Tea Party-Koch Brothers wing of conservatism, (and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party), are clearly on the defensive.

The most significant “tell” is the flailingresponses of reactionaries to the looming threat posed to climate denial by Francis’s Laudato Si.

Jeb Bush’s latest flip-flop — first asserting in New Hampshire that he wouldn’t take his economics from his church, and then backpedaling in Iowa — was merely the most recent spasm of right-wing discomfort.

Earlier Rick Santorum’s sputteringly strove to explain — on Fox news — why he was scolding the Pope, a non-scientist, to remain silent on climate, while Santorum himself, as a politician, had both right and duty to his own climate pulpit.

The assault began when the Heartland Institute tried to bully the Pope — unsuccessfully — into withholding or water down the encyclical by arguing that some of the voices urging climate action — UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs — opposed the Catholic Church on abortion. Indeed the overriding, major chord of the conservative assault on the encyclical is that Christian values only govern sex and family — economics, geopolitics, and climate should be left to secular, capitalist ideology.

Francis’s allies within the Church understand what this means better than outsiders. Archbishop Pedro Barreto Jimeno of Huancayo, Peruwarned that Francis“will have many critics, because they want to continue setting rules of the game in which money takes first place. We have to be prepared for those kinds of attacks.”

The Pope took his critics into account —making it clear within the textof Laudato Si that his approach to the environment is firmly rooted in traditional Catholic views of the uniqueness of human life and the need for a non-market based common good — drawing a line clarifying that he is not preaching a “new age” form of Catholicism.

(Reactionaries’ bewilderment that the Catholic Church’s option for the poor includes protecting them from greenhouse enhanced droughts, heat waves and rising oceans echoes their glib assumption that a presumed “social conservatism” would fence in American Hispanic voters, overriding their communitarian economic and environmental attitudes, and allowing Republicans to retain Hispanic voter loyalty while still promising to “self-deport” 11 million of their relatives.)

It is more a gale than a fresh breeze when the most ground-breaking Pope since John XXIII links poverty and climate, in a way which leaves the far-right sputtering — (just as it was a powerful symbol when a daughter of the Church, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, broke with President Obama on tradeciting climate concerns.)

Indeed, something fundamental is shifting this summer in political and cultural attitudes around climate.

Compare this year to the summer that preceded Copenhagen, the dominant 2009 news on climate was the grinding failure of the US Senate and the Obama Administration on climate and energy legislation. And the rest of the news was equally dispiriting — no progress, little ambition, cynicism about the prospects.

Six months out from Paris, a new dynamism is palpable. Hawaii justcommitted itself to 100 percent clean energy by 2045.The California Senatepledged the world’s seventh largest economy to a 50 percent emission cut by 2030 – including petroleum. The first quarter witnessed a stunning 76 percent growth in US residential solar installations over the previous year. Georgia joined the growing list of states that permit homeowners to generate their own rooftop solar electrons, while giant (and historically conservative) Georgia Power proclaims that it will promote and grow clean power just as aggressively as it previously dominated coal and nuclear.

Globally renewable energy was more than half of added capacity. Chinese emissions declined in the first quarterby an amount equal to the total carbon pollution of Great Britain, Mexico became the first major emerging market to pledge solid emission reductions, and Ethiopia offered to reduce its projected 2030 carbon pollution by 64 percent — if climate finance is made available. Alberta tossed out its pro-tar sands Conservative Premier and elected the first left-leaning government in its history.

Led by “Climate Chancellor” Angela Merkel, :{the world’s major industrial nations called for a binding climate treaty at the “upper end” of the ambition levels:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: required by climate science, and agreed that the era of fossil fuels must end this century. The Saudi Oil Minister signaled that his kingdom fears the era of oil by end by mid-century. And 199 nations meeting in Germany reached a breakthrough agreement on how to curb deforestationand lay the groundwork for an eventual reduction – through forest and grassland sequestration – in atmospheric carbon concentrations.

The price of oil remained mired below $70; OPEC agreed again to keep pumping and fighting for market share; and the share value of coal companies, already down by three-quarters, just kept slumping. (Purchasers two months ago of Peabody junk bonds have already lost 18 percent of their money.)

Sensing a change in the landscape, Europe’s six biggest oil and gas companies abandoned their fossil fuel common front with coal, and threw the black rock and its shareholders under the bus. Re-branding themselves as “almost gas” companies (shades of John Brown and BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” phase) Shell, BP, Total, Eni and British gas called on the international community to levy a global carbon taxthat would drive electricity generators from coal to gas.

This is exciting news for climate. But there are signs that this climate and energy revolution is also breaking apart the frozen tectonic plates which have locked American conservatism into an orthodoxy of inaction not just on global warming, but on almost every problem challenging our society.

No longer do all conservatives join Koch, Heartland, and Republican Presidential candidates in dismissing conservative engagement with climate solutions. Not only are both libertarians (the new Niskanen Center)and business conservatives (American Enterprise Institute)alike debating the need for conservative solutions like carbon taxes, but the first conservative climate progress mega-donor, Jay Faison has surfaced, pledging to spend $175 million on encouraging his movement to come to grips with atmospheric reality.

Over the past decade — ever since the nascent Tea Party partly seized control of Republican politics, shutting down George W. Bush’s forgotten campaign promise to clean up carbon pollution, rebuffing his immigration reforms, and eventually thrusting his “compassionate conservatism” into the fiery abyss of conservative heresy — a new Republican orthodoxy locked down the primary fault zone in American politics, where new realities and social change forces collide with conservative political, cultural, and economic habits.

The Supreme Court’s “money is speech and corporations are people” jurisprudence weakened the ability of business elites to buffer Tea Party pressures on elected Republicans. Even such routine public business as the reauthorization of infrastructure spending or the Export-Import Banks ground to a halt. Nothing, it seemed, was possible.

Tectonic drift isn’t dangerous when the plates glide and rub against each other, releasing their energy gradually. But when they freeze up, the “thrust fault” that results accumulates energy until it cracks, relieving stored up stress in a few seconds, and creating new landscapes and mountain ranges. And when three moving “oceanic” plates (demography, globalization, and climate) converge on the stationary continental plate of American conservatism, the eventual outcome, while unpredictable, is certain to be spectacular.

The crack-up has begun — and surprisingly it seems that climate, not Hispanic voting blocks or global competition, may be the disruption that shatters conservative orthodoxy

usual suspects

http://www.desmog.uk/2015/06/17/who-s-behind-pope-francis-climate-encyclical-denier-attack

http://www.alternet.org/environment/pope-francis-pulls-no-punches-leaked-climate-change-encyclical

...“Statistics on waste are very concerning: a third of food products end up under this heading,” the Pope said in front of representatives from more than 120 countries, citing FAO data showing the magnitude of edible food produced on the planet that is lost or wasted.

The Pontiff also voiced concerns over large-scale acquisitions of agricultural land by multinational companies and governments.