Vatican newspaper discusses Argentine influences on Pope’s encyclical

June 23, 2015

Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, journalist Silvina Perez discussed the Argentine influences on Pope Francis’s new encyclical.

Argentina’s Matanza River basin, she said, is “ranked number eight out of the world’s ten most polluted places. This 60-kilometer stretch is occupied by numerous manufacturing plants — chemical in particular — which pollute the environment, filling the atmosphere with poisons. Despite being deemed unfit for humans, the area is densely populated.”

Perez also noted that “there are currently still 130 million people throughout Latin America who have no access to potable water.” The encyclical is thus “a document composed of pages from real life, strung together on a long steel thread, the stories of refugees who fled from places where social dignity was denied them, victims of the exploitation of resources, victims of the ‘throw-away culture.’”

Perez discussed the Argentines to whom the Pontiff listened as he was drafting the encyclical, including Andean scholar Clelia Luro, film director and politician Pino Solanas, and Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández. Perez added:

Cardinal Peter Turkson and the experts of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace gathered material from various parts of the world, developed various drafts that Pope Francis read and revised, sending drafts to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to the Secretariat of State and to the theologian of the Pontifical Household. Pope Bergoglio meant for the encyclical to be published before the beginning of the Conference on Climate Change in Paris.

 

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Further information:

• The sad voice of mud (L’Osservatore Romano, p. 20)