Chris Matthews screwed up a bit tonight...

[pnwmom]

12. Your concern is noted -- and uneducated.

Catholic Popes, unlike some Christian fundamentalists, have been taking strong pro-environmental positions for decades.

http://nation.time.com/2013/11/15/the-real-reason-pope-francis-posed-with-anti-fracking-activists/

That said, protecting the environment is a classic papal priority. John Paul II called for a new ecological awareness in his 1990 World Day of Peace address. The environmental crisis, he said, was a moral problem, and required new solidarity between industrialized and developing nations. Pope Benedict XVI continued this same push. His 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate, or Charity in Truth, called for the need for agrarian reform, the environment as a stakeholder in modern business, the link between poverty and the lack of care for the environment, and again, the moral need for solidarity between industrialized nations and developing nations.

But, and here’s the key, for both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, ecological justice cannot happen without addressing poverty. John Paul II explained the connection this way in his 1990 speech:

It must also be said that the proper ecological balance will not be found without directly addressing the structural forms of poverty that exist throughout the world. Rural poverty and unjust land distribution in many countries, for example, have led to subsistence farming and to the exhaustion of the soil. Once their land yields no more, many farmers move on to clear new land, thus accelerating uncontrolled deforestation, or they settle in urban centres which lack the infrastructure to receive them. Likewise, some heavily indebted countries are destroying their natural heritage, at the price of irreparable ecological imbalances, in order to develop new products for export. In the face of such situations it would be wrong to assign responsibility to the poor alone for the negative environmental consequences of their actions. Rather, the poor, to whom the earth is entrusted no less than to others, must be enabled to find a way out of their poverty. This will require a courageous reform of structures, as well as new ways of relating among peoples and States.

Benedict continued this same argument in Caritas in Veritate:

Questions linked to the care and preservation of the environment today need to give due consideration to the energy problem. The fact that some States, power groups and companies hoard non-renewable energy resources represents a grave obstacle to development in poor countries. Those countries lack the economic means either to gain access to existing sources of non-renewable energy or to finance research into new alternatives. The stockpiling of natural resources, which in many cases are found in the poor countries themselves, gives rise to exploitation and frequent conflicts between and within nations. These conflicts are often fought on the soil of those same countries, with a heavy toll of death, destruction and further decay. The international community has an urgent duty to find institutional means of regulating the exploitation of non-renewable resources, involving poor countries in the process, in order to plan together for the future.

Pope Francis has already made his concern for the poor paramount. It is widely known that he chose his name after St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the poor. But it is less known that St. Francis is also the patron saint of ecology. John Paul II named St. Francis the patron saint of ecology in 1979, precisely for this theological connection to poverty.“It is my hope that the inspiration of Saint Francis will help us to keep ever alive a sense of ‘fraternity’ with all those good and beautiful things which Almighty God has created,” Pope John Paul II later explained. “And may he remind us of our serious obligation to respect and watch over them with care, in light of that greater and higher fraternity that exists within the human family.”