So here we are waiting for Pope Francis to hand down his encyclical on our moral responsibility to care for the natural environment. Already there is lots of huffing and puffing, and ideological battle lines are being drawn. It seems that virtually nobody in the public media is interested in being taught by the Pope in his magisterial capacity. Instead, all the talk is about how the encyclical can or can’t be used to advance political agendas. Catholics who fear that the Pope is a secret (or perhaps not-so-secret) radical left-winger, are preemptively questioning the Pope’s authority as pope to address questions of the environment at all. Catholics who hope that the pontiff is indeed a radical left-winger, anticipating an encyclical that could have been written by the Environmental Defense Fund (if not the Earth Liberation Front), have suddenly embraced the idea that popes indeed have authority to teach and even bind the consciences of faithful Catholics on questions of moral obligation.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 22:03:24 +0000
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