Indeed we did
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, super star, now probably pondering whether hellfire is sufficient punishment for using incandescent light bulbs!
Never mind that market economies (inseparable from freedom) and fossil fuels have produced:
- Greater standard of living across the globe
- Health care advances and longevity
- Sustainable agriculture for growing population
And yet this current Pope proclaims —
“. . . global warming a major threat to life on the planet and called for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. He also blamed the global market economy for plundering the earth at the expense of the poor and future generations.” Wall Street Journal, 11/16/19
Pope Francis Weighs Adding ‘Ecological Sin’ to Church Teachings
Pontiff considers introducing an abiding concern—environmental protection—into Catechism
By Francis X. Rocca at the Wall Street Journal
VATICAN CITY— Pope Francis, who has made the environment a signature cause of his pontificate, said he was strongly considering adding the category of “ecological sin” to the Catholic Church’s official compendium of teachings.
Pope Francis has stressed the importance of environmental protection since his election in 2013. He dedicated an entire encyclical, “Laudato Si,’” published in 2015, to the topic.
In that document, he called global warming a major threat to life on the planet and called for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. He also blamed the global market economy for plundering the earth at the expense of the poor and future generations.
In 2016, the pope added environmentalism, or “care for our common home,” to the Catholic Church’s traditional seven works of mercy. He also added it to the Beatitudes, the core set of Christian ideals such as meekness and mercy enunciated by Jesus in the Bible, saying: “Blessed are those who protect and care for our common home.”
On Friday, he said he was considering going further. “We must introduce—we are thinking—into the Catechism of the Catholic Church the sin against ecology, the ecological sin against the common home, because it’s a duty,” the pope told an audience of legal experts at the Vatican.
He noted that bishops from the Amazon region meeting at the Vatican in October had defined ecological sin as an “action or omission against God, against others, the community and the environment. It is a sin against future generations and is manifested in the acts and habits of pollution and destruction of the harmony of the environment.”
The pope also urged the assembled jurists to work for “adequate legal protection” of the environment through sanctions against corporations that pollute.
Pope Francis has generally highlighted questions of social and economic justice while playing down traditional Catholic teachings on bioethics, sexuality and the family—an approach that has drawn complaints from conservatives.
The addition of ecological sin wouldn’t be Pope Francis’ first change to the Catechism, published in 1992 under St. John Paul II.
In 2018, Pope Francis strengthened the compendium’s language on capital punishment to state that the death penalty is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and that the church is working “with determination for its abolition world-wide.”
Until then, the church had never entirely ruled out the death penalty if it was the “only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor,” but noted such cases should be extremely rare
