Cardinal Turkson pushes environmental concerns in UNESCO speech
November 09, 2016
Cardinal Peter Turkson, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, promoted the ecological concerns of Pope Francis in a November 9 address to a UNESCO audience.
In his address, Cardinal Turkson said that the defense of the environment has been a common theme of Catholic social thought. He said that Pope Leo XIII had provided “some seeds of current ideas” in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, when he wrote every propery owner should recognize his duty “as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others.”
More recently, Cardinal Turkson continued, St. John Paul II emphasized that some natural resources are limited, and some forms of development pollute the environment.
In his encyclical Laudato Si’, the cardinal continued, Pope Francis has set forth an “integral ecology,” demanding a change in patterns of excessive consumption and inequality. The Pope, he said, rejected the widespread notion that “all reality—including human life—consists of objects which people can endlessly manipulate for the sake of profit and without the slightest ethical consideration.”
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Posted by: [email protected] -
Nov. 10, 2016 7:25 PM ET USA
Another pseudo scientist mouthing the Pope's pseudo science on climate change which is nothing but redistribution. To think that we are capable of controlling the earth'so climate and its changes is arrogant on our part.
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Posted by: Randal Mandock -
Nov. 10, 2016 3:01 AM ET USA
St JPII "emphasized that some natural resources are limited." This was certainly the popular view at the time he wrote it, but with recent discoveries of vast quantities of "nonrenewable" resources beyond the orbit of the earth, this notion is only partially tenable. Our ability to access these off-planet resources of course depends on our courage to explore and our ability to create new technologies that will take us to these resources, mine them, and then return them here. God's bounty amazes.
