Pope Francis addressed one of the thorniest issues in American politics on Wednesday with a White House speech explicitly supporting Barack Obama’s plan to cut carbon emissions and chastising climate change deniers for failing in their duty to protect our “common home”.
In a tougher-than-expected call for action on global warming, the spiritual leader of more than 70 million American Catholics defied calls among some Republicans to steer clear of politics by making clear he believed this was a moral issue. “Climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation,” said the pope, who invited contrast with the civil rights struggle by invoking the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr in support of his argument.
Barack Obama introduced the welcoming ceremony, the pope’s first public event of the six-day trip to the United States, as a moment to “shake our conscience from slumber”. His target audience was less the 11,000 hand-picked visitors crammed onto the south lawn – or even the several thousand more faithful on the neighbouring Ellipse – than the millions of watching Americans who remain skeptical of the need for radical climate action.
From the moment his famous cassock materialized under the emblematic White House colonnade on Wednesday, any doubt this would be a deeply political visit by Pope Francis vanished. “Mr President, I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution,” the pope said with a slow, deliberate delivery that left little room for misinterpretation.
And, lest a papal blessing for the Environmental Protection Agency’s new emission control standards not prove a shocking enough incongruity, the pope made clear his view that support was a moral imperative for all Americans.
“I would like all men and women of goodwill in this great nation to support the efforts of the international community to protect the vulnerable in our world and to stimulate integral and inclusive models of development, so that our brothers and sisters everywhere may know the blessings of peace and prosperity which God wills for all his children,” he said to loud applause.
Whether Republican opponents of the EPA rule change will consider themselves “men and women of goodwill” in this case will become clearer on Thursday, when the pope is expected to make a similar appeal in a direct address to Congress.
In the meantime, the pontiff emphasized his belief that politicians owe a debt not just to the planet and their children, but particularly to the underprivileged in the world seen as most at risk from the effects of global warming.
“Such change demands on our part a serious and responsible recognition not only of the kind of world we may be leaving to our children, but also to the millions of people living under a system which has overlooked them,” he said.
“Our common home has been part of this group of the excluded which cries out to heaven and which today powerfully strikes our homes, our cities and our societies,” he added. “To use a telling phrase of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note and now is the time to honor it.”
