Fox News tries takedown of Pope Francis' upcoming climate encyclical

Joel Connelly
Seattle Post Intelligencer
January 2, 2015

Pope Francis is warming to his job as a bridge builder and teacher on the world stage, and is setting the stage for a dramatic encyclical on the threat posed by the warming of the Earth.

The Jesuit pope will soon visit Tacloban, a city in the Philippines devastated in 2012 by Super-Typhoon Haiyan. He is expected to address the United Nations General Assembly on its 70th anniversary in September. And an influential bishop recently previewed Francis’ encyclical on a trip to Britain.

“Just as humanity confronted revolutionary change in the 19th century at the time of industrialization, today we have changed the natural environment so much,” said Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

“If present trends continue, the century will witness unprecedented climate change and destruction of the ecosystem with tragic consequences,” Sorondo added.

The push back against the pope, at least on climate, began on Fox News’ “Special Report” two nights before the new year.

The encyclical is in danger of “aligning (Francis) with some church enemies,” warned correspondent Doug McKelway, including “a few environmental extremists who favor widespread population control and wealth distribution.”

Mar Moreno, a climate skeptic and former aide to Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. — who characterizes climate change science as “a hoax” — argued that there has been “no global warming” for “almost two decades.”

Of Francis, conservative Fox pundit Charles Krauthammer said on another Fox program: “I wasn’t aware he was a scientist.” The pope will, Krauthammer argued, risk his credibility if he moves off “ethics and dogma” into such fields as the warming planet.

Similar arguments were voiced nearly 50 years ago, when Pope Paul VI made his trip to New York and delivered the famous declaration: “War no more, war never again.”

Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, is himself a Catholic. The chairman of parent News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, is raising and educating as Catholics the daughters from his latest marriage, and had them baptized in the Jordan River. Fox pundit Sean Hannity, a self-professed devout Catholic, is an outspoken climate change skeptic.

The community of so-called climate skeptics includes such Catholic politicians (and coal advocates) as House Speaker John Boehner.

They are likely to be challenged — big time — by Pope Francis. The pope has already condemned “the cult of money” and trickle-down economics. He is apparently looking to light a fire under the world’s politicians on the warming of the Earth.

“The idea is to convene a meeting with leaders of the main religions to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion,” said Bishop Sorondo.

The pope himself, in an October meeting with Latin American and Asian peasants, argued that “monopolizing of farm lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth.

“Climate change, the loss of diversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness.”

Powerful words. Expect the pope to rattle more gilded cages from the Throne of Peter in the near future.