Despite the santorum splattered about, the Pontiff of the Church Universal and Triumphant [EDIT: This is actually referring to the Roman Catholic Church, not the Church Universal and Triumphant] is going to agree with the climate change consensus in an encyclical to be released on Thursday. Early leaks give some idea of the content.
Pope Francis is preparing to declare humans as primarily responsible for climate change, call for fossil fuels to be replaced by renewable energy and decry the culture of consumerism, a leaked draft of his much anticipated statement on the environment suggests.
The source for this somehow concerns Australians, but we will take any indication of infallibility where we can get it.
So the humble submitter has to wonder, does this mean that climate-change deniers are now to be considered heretics, rather than just Petro shills or anti-environmental conservative conspiracy theorists? It does add a entirely new dimension to the debate, and I hope that God will forgive your Conservative asses for screwing up Her creation in the quest for profit.
UPDATE - janrinok 18 Jun 12:36UTC
is it possible to update/append aristarchus' post "Pope Affirms Anthropogenic Global Warming" (https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/06/17/0317256), as follows:
Update: The encyclical can be read and downloaded here.
I am not affiliated with the submitter, aristarchus, or the pope. I have a slightly paranoid reason for asking for this update; it is my experience that, whenever politically important documents are published, the actual document often gets overshadowed by an enormous load of blog commentary, providing a bit of "damage control" and "spin". It is my fervent opinion that the readership of Soylentnews deserves to read the actual source documents. (It's only 82 pages long, in this case, anyway).
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Thursday June 18 2015, @01:33AM
It seems though that the Church has learned its lesson about mixing science and religious doctrine from the Galileo affair, most clearly in recent Popes' declarations about the matter. Even then, do remember that while the Church back in his day did give Galileo a hard time, they never actually excommunicated him. They excommunicated Giordano Bruno though, not so much for his scientific beliefs, but more for denying core Catholic doctrines like the Trinity and transubstantiation. The excommunications in recent days have mostly been over matters of doctrine (including abortion-related ones) and over the authority of the Church (there have been a number of these, mostly involving traditionalist Catholic groups and organisations like the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association who do things like consecrate bishops without papal approval).
It is extremely doubtful that the Francis will make some sort of pronouncement invoking papal infallibility on the matter of AGW. Official invocations of infallibility are very rare: in fact, it's been invoked only once since its solemn definition by the First Vatican Council, by Pope Pius XII on the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary in 1950.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 18 2015, @02:17AM
I'm not sure how relevant it is to the conversation, but Nicolaus Copernicus was a monk.
I don't think the church had any problem with his work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2015, @08:45AM
Galileo was friends with the Pope. After discussing his ideas with the Pope, he wrote a book that included a character using the Pope's arguments with the name of Simplicio (simpleton or idiot). It was just feuding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2015, @03:03AM