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Pope Francis Calls For Global Climate Action

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The Pope and climate change. We’ll look at the urgent call for action from Pope Francis.

Pope Francis delivers his message on the occasion of an audience with participants of Rome's diocese convention in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, June 14, 2015. Francis engaged in some self-promotion during his weekly blessing, alerting the thousands of people in St. Peter's Square that his first solo encyclical is coming out on Thursday and inviting them to pay attention to environmental degradation around them. (AP)
Pope Francis delivers his message on the occasion of an audience with participants of Rome's diocese convention in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, June 14, 2015. Francis engaged in some self-promotion during his weekly blessing, alerting the thousands of people in St. Peter's Square that his first solo encyclical is coming out on Thursday and inviting them to pay attention to environmental degradation around them. (AP)

Pope Francis is not afraid to go big on an issue, and this week the Pope is going big on climate change – and hoping to take faithful Catholics and the whole world with him. In a powerful encyclical coming out tomorrow, Pope Francis says “our common home” – Creation - is in danger. Denial is immoral.  Half measures to respond are no longer enough. Humanity must rethink its relationship with the Earth. The way it lives. And rich nations first, to save the poor. The message is direct and detailed and challenging to nearly all. This hour On Point: Pope Francis goes all in on battling climate change.
-- Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Michael O'Loughlin, national reporter for Crux, the Boston Globe's Catholic news vertical. (@mikeoloughlin)

Thomas Groome, professor of theology and religious education at Boston College, where he is the director of the school's Church in the 21st Century Center. Author of "What Makes Us Catholic."

John Gehring, Catholic Program Director at Faith in Public Life. Author of the forthcoming book, "The Francis Effect." (@gehringdc)

Wen Stephenson, journalist, climate activist and contributing writer for The Nation. Former senior producer of On Point with Tom Ashbrook. Author of the forthcoming book, "What We're Fighting For Now Is Each Other." (@wenstephenson)

From Tom’s Reading List

Crux: The US Catholic Church is ready to go green -- "The encyclical is sparking controversy in the Catholic world even before its release. Last month, the Vatican hosted a conference about climate change with UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon in attendance. In response, a Chicago-based group of climate change skeptics staged a protest event in Rome."

Bold Faith Type: Can Francis break the US climate change stalemate? — "For decades now, scientists have raised increasingly urgent warnings about human-induced climate change. Headlines grow more ominous every day. Global carbon emissions are at record levels. Water shortages, including in the western United States, have reached crisis proportions. The Pentagon expects climate change to intensity global instability. The world’s poor—those least responsible for the carbon emissions in the first place—are already paying the heaviest price. Even in the face of this stark reality, a growing number of Americans say global warming is not occurring, or rank the issue low in importance."

The Nation: The Gospel According to Wendell Berry -- "Wendell Berry, going strong at 80, is many things: a poet, a novelist, an essayist, an agrarian, a family man, a small farmer on the banks of the Kentucky River, a member of his rural community. And he’s an activist—perhaps even an environmentalist, though he transcends any narrow idea of what that word may mean. Like Henry David Thoreau, who was as much an abolitionist as a naturalist, Berry is most deeply concerned with how to live in relation not just to nature, but to nature and one’s fellow human beings—one’s community, in every sense, human and wild—because the two cannot be separated."

This program aired on June 17, 2015.

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