NEW YORK — Conservative distrust of Pope Francis, which has been building in the U.S. throughout his pontificate, is reaching a boiling point over his plan to urge action on climate change — and to do so through a document traditionally used for the most important papal teachings.
For months, Francis has been drafting an encyclical on the environment and global warming that he hopes to release by June or July. Encyclicals are written with the help of a small group of advisers working under strict secrecy. But in a news conference as he traveled last week to the Philippines, Francis gave his strongest signal yet of the direction he’ll take.
He said global warming was mostly man-made. And he said he wanted his encyclical out in plenty of time to be absorbed before the next round of U.N. climate change talks in Paris in November after the last round in Lima, Peru, failed to reach an agreement.
“I don’t know if it (human activity) is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face,” Francis said. “We have, in a sense, taken over nature.”
“Complete disaster”
Even before these remarks, several conservative U.S. commentators had been pre-emptively attacking the encyclical. At Investor’s Business Daily, Forbes and , writers had accused the pope of adopting a radical environmental agenda.
“Pope Francis — and I say this as a Catholic — is a complete disaster when it comes to his public policy pronouncements,” wrote Steve Moore, chief economist of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “On the economy, and even more so on the environment, the pope has allied himself with the far left and has embraced an ideology that would make people poorer and less free.”
At the website of the Catholic journal First Things, a blogger accused the pope of promoting “theologized propaganda” on conservation — a post the journal’s editor later disavowed.
“(Conservatives) are scared that the document is going to say something definitive that they can’t agree with. That will put them in a very difficult situation,” said David Cloutier, a theologian at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland who specializes in the environment.
New ground
While Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI took strong stands in favor of environmental protection, Francis will be the first to address climate change in such a significant way. He will be doing so following a series of sermons, interviews and writings that have unsettled American conservatives accustomed to hearing many of their priorities — on abortion and marriage especially — echoed loudly from Rome.
Francis’ strong and frequent denunciations of the global financial system and trickle-down economic theories prompted radio host Rush Limbaugh to call the pope’s economic views “pure Marxism.” The pontiff has said he is simply quoting church teaching on helping the poor.
After Francis helped normalize U.S. relations with Cuba, Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American and Florida Republican who opposed detente, said he would “ask His Holiness to take up the cause of freedom and democracy.”
By tackling climate change, Francis is marching through yet another U.S. partisan minefield and taking a position abhorrent to many Republicans. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to consider climate-change real and largely man-made. While about a quarter of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents agree, the rest blame natural patterns, say not enough is known or insist warming is not occurring at all, according to the Pew Research Center.
“What they’re worried about is the solution,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
