Pope issues challenge to world to clean up act

POPE Francis’ plea to make the state of the environment a central moral issue of our age has been welcomed by climate activists and a range of church, science and government leaders.

In “Laudato Si,” Francis addressed “every living person on this planet”, urging them to hear “both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor” about the damage from “compulsive consumerism”, waste and a single-minded pursuit of profit. The Pope’s “marching orders for advocacy”, as the head of the US conference of bishops calls it, comes ahead of the start of international climate change negotiations later this year in Paris.

Francis said he hoped his paper would lead both ordinary people in their daily lives and decision-makers at the Paris UN climate meetings to a wholesale change of mind and heart.

The document, released on Thursday, put care for the environment at the centre of Catholic social teaching, and, in stark terms, reframed the discussion about global warming from the dry language of science to a broad question of ethics.

“Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years,” Francis writes. “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

Many praised the encyclical: “It has the power to reshape the church and realign politics,” said Austen Ivereigh, author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.

But some politically conservative Catholics criticised its economic analysis, and some US Republican politicians said religion had no place in climate policy.

“No, I’m sorry, it’s a political issue,” said Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah, chairman of the US House committee on natural resources. “Most people have their minds made up on this issue, so any more rhetoric about the issue doesn’t really add a heck of a lot more to it.”