Pope Francis issued his first encyclical today. Papal encyclicals are letters issued by the Roman Catholic pope to the Church’s leadership, especially the bishops, but sometimes restricted only to the bishops of a particular nation or diocese. This ambitious encyclical, entitled Laudato Si, meaning “Praise Be To You,” is a 184-page tome calling on the world to reduce what Pope Francis regards mostly as human-induced global warming.
Like many non-Catholic Christians, I have serious disagreements with the Roman Catholic Church. Yet I have had many Catholic friends who I believe are devout Christians. And I respect some things about their Church, especially its focus on Jesus dying for our sins on the cross and its concern for the poor. The Roman Catholic Church has surely issued many encyclicals with which I would firmly disagree. In fact, in my next book, due in September, I have a rather innovative chapter that I think is devastating to the doctrine of the papacy. I don’t mind the Church having a leading spokesman as the Apostle Peter was among the twelve. But papal infallibility–fuhgeddaboudit! Laying aside this major disagreement, I think Pope Franics is right on the mark with this encyclical!
It helps to understand this 77-year old pope’s courageous and controversial appeal to this issue by knowing a little about his background and the firsts he has accomplished as pope. This 266th Roman Catholic pope is the first to come from the Americas, the Southern Hemisphere, an underdeveloped country, and the Jesuits. Jesuits must make vows of poverty and are known for their service to the people. Pope Francis is known for his humility, commitment to poor people, and interest in inter-faith dialogue. So, he stands out as a pope of the people, especially poor people.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Being large, for a while as a young man he was a bouncer at a nightclub. [When he became pope, the Vatican did not have clothing large enough for him.] He achieved masters degrees in chemistry and philosophy and a doctorate in theology. In 1969, he became a priest. Back in 1958, Bergoglio became a Jesuit by entering the Society of Jesus. Jesuits are known for being intellectual, missionary-oriented, humble, and devoted to improving the lot of poor people.
That’s why the bishops chose Pope Francis. The previous pope, Joseph Ratzinger named Benedict XVI, had been an accomplished theologian and prolific writer who for twenty-five years had headed up the Church’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine and the Faith. After being pope for seven years, he unexpectedly and surprisingly resigned from office on February 28, 2013. Only five previous popes had ever resigned. The last one had been Gregory XII in 1415.
Why did Pope Benedict resign even though, at age 85 and the oldest pope to ever have been elected, he seemed to be in good health? Popes are expected to remain in office until death. Benedict’s resignation seems to have been due to his disgust with, and inability to correct, economic scandel and power-grab in the Vatican. But he also had commited a mishap in a speech in which, in a brief remark, he severely criticized Islam.
Evidence of this inner-Vatican problem has come to light with this encyclical. The Vatican asked local news media not to pre-publish anything about this encyclical if they learned about any of its contents. On Moday, Sandro Magister–a former Vatican correspondent, writer for the popular weekly L’Espresso, and critic of Pope Francis and his Vatican reform policies–leaked all of the encyclical by posting it on his website. Vatican insiders said it was due to resistance to Pope Francis’ reform policies and thus competition for power in the Vatican.
This encyclical has aroused considerable opposition, especially from Republican lawmakers in the U.S. For example, yesterday, Republican Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma said, “The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours.” Republican and Roman Catholic Rick Santorum–an attorney, former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, and contender for the 2016 presential election–said two weeks ago that Pope Francis should “leave science to scientists.” And former Florida governor and member of the presedential Bush family, Republican Jeb Bush, who is a Roman Catholic convert and announced his candicacy for U.S. president last week, said yesterday, “I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope.” He added, “religion ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm.”
In his encyclical, Pope Francis is advocating for the poor and calling all people of the world to be worthy custodians of planet earth. How is that not a moral, religious issue? It looks like these men don’t get it. But that’s not it. They are too smart for that. For several years, some of these Republican politicians in the U.S. have been denying the existence of global warming. But so much scientific data has now proved them wrong that they now admit it but deny that humans are causing it or causing it to any significant degree. So, Inhofe, Santorum, and Bush are merely continuing to deny human-induced global warming just have they have been.
How are we humans causing global warming? It’s the constant burning of fossil fuels, especially oil and coal, to drive our cars, trucks, and tractors, fly our airplanes, transport our goods, arm our militaries, and provide electricity to our homes. Decades of carbon dioxide that results from burning these fuels does not just vanish from earth’s atmosphere but pollutes it, destroys the ozone, even does destruction in our oceans, and heats up our planet resulting in melting ice at our poles and raising ocean levels.
The world didn’t have hardly any of these technological advancements of electricity and transportation prior to the latter part of the nineteenth century and thus the Industrial Revolution. But accordingly to a huge majority of climate scientists nowadays, these technological advancements that require fossil fuels are negatively affecting our environment. I think these politicians who differ are going to look foolish in the future and that Bible prophecy indicates it.
Pope Francis has long been an environmental activist. So, he is no newcomer to this discussion about global warming. He says in his encyclical that this is certainly happening and that the main people throughout the world who are going to suffer from this continuing, human-induced global warming are the poor people. The Republican party is known for being pro-commerce, for doing everything to promote capitalism. The reduction of burning fossil fuels will be costly to business. it will require sacrifice. Although the U.S. only has 5% of the world’s population, we have been doing 25% of the total burning of fossil fuels worldwide for over more than the past half century. I think we Americans need to do some serious introspection about this.
The world first tried to do something about this increased global warming with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in 1992. In 1997 at Kyoto, Japan, these nations met again and drafted an international treaty, called the Kyoto Protocol, in which most agreed to reduce its emissions to prescribed targets. So far, 195 nations have signed the Kyoto Protocol, but the U.S., the biggest culprit causing global warming, has never signed it. It argues that the agreement is not fair. This issue will heat up more later this year when the UN again holds another convention on this matter. That’s why Pope Francis issued this encyclical at this time.
I first became interested in the U.S. dependence on foreign oil in 1973 when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) issued their declaration to refuse to sell oil and gas to any nation that traded with Israel. It was a sort of revenge against Israel for winning the 1973 war against a consortium of surrounding Arab nations. Since the U.S. was the #1 ally of Israel and its primary beneficiary of U.S. foreign aid, the U.S. was on the list of nations OPEC would no longer sell oil and gas. That hit the U.S. severly right in the pocket book. As the largest consuming nation of oil and gas in the world at the time ever since, the U.S. often depended on half or more of its petroleum needs as purchases mostly from these OPEC nation. This OPEC decision quickly resulted in long automobile lines at gasoline stations. And within six months of this OPEC decision, the price of a 55-gallon barrel of oil unexpectedly quadrupled.
I was astonished that we Americans were refusing to answer this wake up call. It was so obvious to me that the U.S. needed to become energy self-sufficient. We needed to do this for several reasons, certainly for our economy but also to maintain our military defense. We could become seriously vulnerable in both areas. But we Americans refused to pay more money at the gas pump, require that our automobiles get much better gas-mileage, downsize our SUVs, seriously explore the development of renewable energy such as solar and wind power, and in general reducing our enormous waste by conserving our natural resources. I soon became further interested in this subject by becoming a vegetable gardener and a grower of fruit trees. I read many books about this and energy-sufficient housing. I think I was influential in my eldest daughter and her husband building and successfully raising their young family in an energy self-sufficient, straw-bale, stucco house off the grid and on forty acres on a mountain 7,000 feet high in Colorado.
The Bible is not silent about how human beings treat this planet and its natural resources that God made and gave to them to live on. In my most recent book, Warrior from Heaven (2009), I have the following two paragraphs in a section with the subhead The Everlasting Covenant (pp. 128-29):
“After the flood in Noah’s day, God made an everlasting covenant with him and his descendants that included all subsequent humans. It required that all people be good custodians of planet earth, preserving its environment. But people continually broke this covenant. Mostly due to selfishness and monetary greed, they misused, squandered, polluted, and destroyed the earth’s resources. Such pollution, especially in recent centuries, had devastating effects on the earth’s overall environment. People transgressed many good, man-made environmental laws, violated statutes, and thereby broke the everlasting covenant.
“Ultimately, it happened because most people did not believe in God as earth’s Creator. Consequently, they denied that there would ever be a divine reckoning on judgment day for such ill behavior. They refused to believe that they must someday give an account of their activities, which would include how they treated God’s creation and therefore whether they kept the everlasting covenant. So, the time came when those who destroyed the earth must themselves be destroyed. God always fits the punishment to the crime.”
These two paragraphs have biblical references in the margins which read as follows in the NRSV:
Genesis 9.16-17: [Concerning the rainbow], “‘When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.’ God said to Noah, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.'”
Isaiah 24.5: [At the endtime], “The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws violated the statues, broken the everlasting covenant.” Read the rest of this divine indictment.
Revelation 11.18: [At the endtime, thus the second coming of Christ], “The nations raged, but your [God’s] wrath has come, and the time for judging the dead, for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints and all who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth.” This last clause says it all. Those who are seriously destructible custodians of this planet will pay the consequences at the Judgment. And I think it is also an indictment against those in our day who deny that we humans are mistreating our planet by creating nuclear waste, contributing to the extinction of many kinds of animals, deforrestation, and inducing global warming.
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