It’s been 5 years since Pope Francis sounded alarm on climate change – did Tennessee Catholics listen? – Knoxville News Sentinel

By James Bruggers  |  InsideClimate News

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Catholics in the Knoxville area and other parts of Tennessee have yet to fully embrace Pope Francis’s landmark teaching document on climate change, in which the pontiff calls for prompt global action to move away from fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions warming the planet.

“Francis said there is a call to open up a dialogue,” with his 2015 “Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home,” said Jim Wogan, the spokesman for the Diocese of Knoxville, which serves more than 70,000 Catholics. “In East Tennessee, in the Diocese of Knoxville, we are clearly at that stage.”

Still, Wogan said, care for the Earth and for life — which Francis blended in the first papal encyclical on the environment — are important pastoral callings in the region’s Catholic churches and schools, even if the diocese hasn’t engaged in all the Laudato Si’ activities common to bigger cities.

That’s pretty much the case across Tennessee, where climate change remains controversial, said Cliff Cockerham, a Catholic climate activist in Nashville. Polling shows Tennessee residents on average are less likely than Americans as a whole to accept climate science that blames climate change on human activities, according to the Yale Program on Climate Communication.

“It takes courage for a pastor to take up climate change, or it has in the past,” said Cockerham, an advisor to a Catholic youth program that conducts climate strikes, and a Tennessee leader with the Global Catholic Climate Movement, which works with the Vatican on Laudato Si’ initiatives. “I would say once we get past a Republican and Democratic consensus, especially in Washington, that we need to deal with this crisis, then yes, they will speak about it.”

Laudato Si’ represented a seminal integration of the environment and humanity (the title is from the first words of the encyclical, “Praise be to you my Lord”). But earlier this year, Francis criticized world governments for their “very weak” response to the climate crisis. In June, he issued guidance for carrying out his climate encyclical that included calling on Catholics to divest themselves of investments in fossil fuel companies.

With this new sense of urgency, the Vatican launched a year-long program of Laudato Si’ activities and put in place a new, seven-year call to action.

The encyclical broadly accepts the scientific consensus that climate change is principally a man-made phenomenon. Without prompt global action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and slow the planet’s warming, it says, there will be profound environmental, social, political and economic consequences. The pope clearly identifies the use of fossil fuels as a cause of climate change.  

Yale University scholar Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, described the pope’s commitment on climate as “unprecedented” and said it represents a “structural change” in how the world is confronting climate change and other environmental issues, such as pollution.

Science and policy have led the response to environmental concerns for decades, she said, but the pope has interjected a moral force linking people with their environment.

“It’s not just social justice issues, and not just environmental issues,” Tucker said. “It’s the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, all coming together in various movements. The encyclical names this ‘integral ecology’.”

The global coronavirus pandemic, she added, “is making the linkages even more clear. You cannot have healthy people on a sick planet.”

A message for the planet

To the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics — including about 70 million in the United States — a papal encyclical is a pastoral letter that carries a special gravitas. But with Laudato Si’,  the pope intended it to reach everyone on the planet.

“The encyclical stands on millennia of Catholic teachings, starting with the Genesis story,” said Anna Wagner, an engagement director with the five-year-old Global Catholic Climate Movement, which works with the Vatican on climate matters. “It takes ancient lessons of our faith and expresses them in a new way,” she said.

Upon the encyclical’s release in June, 2015, the pope took to Twitter to declare, bluntly: “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

At the time, scientists were warning that global warming, rising seas, and supercharged weather were no longer a distant threat. Five years later, scientists have documented how climate change is intensifying droughts, wildfires and hurricanes, and have said that carbon emissions need to drop 45 percent by 2030 if the world is to have a chance at fending off the worst effects of climate change.

In Laudato Si’, Francis blended the latest science on climate and the loss of biological diversity with a heavy dose of economics, Catholic teaching and a call to treat all humans with dignity and respect.

“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications,” he wrote, especially for the poor and in developing nations.

Rich countries are hurting poor countries, Francis wrote, calling for an economic system with “more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations.”

The encyclical was seen in some camps as an attack on capitalism, and it made some Catholic Republican leaders squirm, like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who in 2015 observed that the pope “is not a scientist.”

The conservative Heartland Institute, which has long sought to undercut climate science, accused Francis of being misled by what a spokesman described as “false prophets,” or the “agenda-driven bureaucrats at the United Nations.”

Five years later, climate activist and journalist Bill McKibben, who has taught Sunday school in Methodist churches and has been open about his own Christian faith, described the encyclical as among the most important documents of recent decades.

“It has its roots in the climate crisis, but it understands it in a much larger sense,” McKibben said. “And it presages what has happened over the last four of five years as people realize that the environmental movement needs to be the environmental justice movement.”

It’s important, as well, McKibben said, because of the Pope’s reach as a global faith leader and “arguably the most recognizable figure in the world.”

‘Grave concern’ about world’s response

Laudato Si’ created a global buzz before and after it was published. But its impact has been mixed inside the sprawling church, a massive global institution known to move slowly.

The National Catholic Reporter, a Kansas City-based independent Catholic news outlet with dedicated climate coverage, found examples around the world in which individual Catholics, parishes and institutions had responded to Laudato Si’.

Bishops in the Philippines have been fighting coal-fired power plants. American Catholic nuns and their partners in Ghana launched a plastic recycling program to reduce waste and increase employment. The U.S. Conference of Bishops, citing Laudato Si’, has opposed the Trump administration’s rollback or repeals of key environmental regulations.

The Global Catholic Climate Movement is another example. Launched as Laudato Si’ was released, it has grown to encompass 900 Catholic organizations in dozens of countries. The organization has spearheaded some of Catholicism’s most visible climate actions, from faith-based youth climate strikes to persuading a growing number of Catholic institutions to pull their investments in fossil fuel companies.

But the National Catholic Reporter also concluded that the pope’s message had not been as widely received as Francis had hoped.

“Sadly, the urgency of this ecological conversion seems not to have been grasped by international politics, where the response to the problems raised by global issues such as climate change remains very weak and a source of grave concern,” the pope told 180 diplomats meeting at the Vatican in January. He also praised the rising voices of young people demanding urgent action on climate change.

This summer, the Vatican announced the “Laudato Si’ Action Platform.” It asks Catholics and Catholic institutions to achieve sustainability within seven years.

The Vatican itself continues to gather advice from high-level scientists and other experts in working groups, with both climate and COVID-19 in mind.

“The Vatican is pulling expertise from all over the world to chart a course for a post-COVID world,” Tucker said. “This is a huge commitment.”

The importance of Catholic divestment

Experts will argue over whether divestment campaigns actually cripple the targeted industries. But to their supporters, the campaigns hurt companies by diminishing their reputations and their access to capital, the lifeblood of any corporation.

Various Catholic institutions have been divesting from fossil fuel companies for several years, including the University of Dayton and Georgetown University, with the pace picking up since Laudato Si’, though many still have not divested, McKibben said.

The author of more than 15 books, including The End of Nature, published in 1989 as an early warning about global warming, McKibben is also co-founder of the environmental group 350.org, which has run its own divestment campaign since 2012. 

It counts more than 1,200 institutions and local governments and thousands of individuals representing over $14 trillion as having pledged to divest their assets from fossil fuels, including the Episcopal church, the Church of England, and the World Council of Churches.

S&P Global, a financial information and analysis company, has said the movement is gaining traction and reported a new sense of clean-energy optimism in the market.

The Global Catholic Climate Movement called the new divestment effort  the first-ever endorsement of a fossil fuel divestment campaign to come from the full Vatican and said it followed the largest-ever announcement of divestment by faith institutions. In May 2020, 42 institutions in 14 countries announced their commitment to drop fossil fuels.

“The more that banks and fossil fuel companies and insurance companies see investment in fossil fuels is a losing strategy, the more they are going to distance themselves from fossil fuel industry projects and see them as a losing strategy in terms of finances and risk,” Wagner said. 

Engaging conservative Catholics 

The pope’s renewed climate push this year comes as Americans face a presidential election pitting two candidates with widely divergent views on climate change. 

For nearly four years, President Donald Trump has taken the country in the opposite direction from the Vatican, working to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a global action to fight climate change. Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden, a Catholic, has embraced the encyclical, as well as a $2 trillion clean economy jobs program and timetable to achieve net-zero carbon emissions no later than 2050.

For some Catholics, Trump’s fossil-fuel agenda has provided motivation to act on their own, said Dan Misleh, executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant, a national nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. that includes 19 U.S. Catholic partner institutions and works to incorporate the encyclical’s message in education and worship.  “People were saying nothing is going to happen on the national level, so we need to act at the local and state level,” he said.

The encyclical has inspired action across the country, he said. His organization has encouraged the creation of dozens of so-called Creation Care Teams to lead community action. It started Catholic Energies, focused on solar power and energy efficiency. And it is encouraging advocacy in state capitals and Washington, D.C. “It’s made a difference and it’s continued to unfold,” Misleh said.

The Archdiocese of Atlanta has been among the leaders. There, Susan Varlamoff, 70, a now-retired biologist and her colleagues at the University of Georgia wrote a climate action plan for the archdiocese, which serves 1.2 million Catholics across much of Georgia.

Five years later, “we are starting to make our way and to get this information out,” said Varlamoff. “We are exchanging best practices. There are so many Catholic scientists who desperately want to work for caring for creation. We are just moving forward with people who believe as we do.”

The Atlanta climate action plan has been or is being used as a point of reference for climate plans at the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and at dioceses in Boston, Columbus, Minneapolis, San Diego and elsewhere, Misleh and other Catholic leaders said.

The Diocese of Nashville has not adopted a climate action plan, but several parishes have used Laudato Si’ as a study guide in adult education programs, and had guest speakers on the topic, said Rick Musacchio, spokesman for the diocese.

The Knoxville Diocese has neither begun work on a climate action plan nor established Creation Care Teams, acknowledged Wogan, the diocese spokesman. It serves nearly 73,000 registered Catholics in East Tennessee and has 51 parishes and 10 schools.

Catholics are a minority in Tennessee, representing just 6 percent of adults, according to the Pew Research Center. Evangelical Christians are the dominant faith, at 52 percent of the population, putting the state in the nation’s conservative Bible Belt.

Both the cities of Knoxville and Nashville have been working on plans to reduce their carbon emissions, so acting on climate is familiar to the region. But Wogan called climate change a “hot button issue,” and sought to diminish its relative importance in the encyclical.

“If you take the encyclical as a whole, it’s broader than fossil fuels and carbon footprints,” Wogan said. “The Holy Father calls us to be stewards of the Earth.”

He said the diocese follows socially responsible investment guidelines but did not answer directly whether that included divestment in fossil fuel companies. He said he is confident that the diocese would consider “how to best implement the Vatican’s recent guidance on fossil fuels.”

Diocese schools and parishes recycle and look for ways to save energy while seeking guidance on the encyclical from Knoxville Diocese Bishop Richard Stika.

“Our Creation Care Team is our bishop,” Wogan said. “He came out after the encyclical was released and backed it,” Wogan said. “In November, he also spoke about elements of the encyclical in a column he wrote.”

Stika is very active on Twitter, where he engages in political discussions, often commenting on abortion and the death penalty.

Those are the more “predictable” issues that align Stika more closely to Republican than Democratic Party thinking, said Tricia Bruce, a Knoxville-based sociologist of religion and book author who has written extensively about Catholics, and who has worked with the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops.

Catholics, she said, look a lot like the general American population “in that they are very divided.”

For his part, Stika said in his written statement about the encyclical five years ago that “the Holy Father reminds us of that the beauty of Creation that surrounds us is a gift,” while he lamented that “some will try to place the Holy Father’s words into a political framework and limit discussion to just a few talking points.” He did not mention climate change.

In the November column, Stika wrote that a “failure to be thankful to God is symptomatic of a ‘throwaway culture.’ Think of the many ‘disposable’ items of plastic, paper, or Styrofoam that we briefly use each day and then discard as trash. We like the convenience of these things simply because it alleviates the need of taking any responsibility for their care.”

He then observed that “even the precious gift of human life is victim to this ‘throwaway’ mentality, referring to abortion. 

Francis, in his encyclical, wrote that “concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion.”

National Catholic leaders acknowledged that some dioceses and parishes are less willing to embrace the climate fight due to competing priorities or resistance on political grounds. 

Still, Misleh and other Catholics who are deeply concerned about climate change don’t hesitate to engage Catholic conservatives who oppose abortion and reject the urgency to act on climate — a position not uncommon among Republicans.

“One cannot be concerned about the unborn and not be concerned about the world in which they are born into,” said Michael Terrien, who works on climate issues with the Archdiocese of Chicago, which serves 2.2 million Catholics.

While the pope’s climate encyclical is still taking hold in Tennessee, Cockerham said he believes Francis’ renewed emphasis on Laudato Si’ this year and over the next seven years may change that, especially as Catholics see connections between climate change and the pandemic.

“We are praying that God’s will be heard, and people will see the lessons of COVID-19 as an opportunity to learn what happens if we ignore the environment,” he said.

Paraphrasing a parable from the Bible, Cockerham said, “seeds have been planted. A whole lot have fallen among rocks and died.”

But some are sprouting now, and, he said: “I think we are approaching the season of growth, followed by the season of harvest.”

About InsideClimate News

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