Pope Francis Urges World Leaders and All of Us to More Aggressively Address the Climate Crisis before it is Too Late

“The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point” – Pope Francis in a Report  called ‘Laudate Deum’, released by the Pontiff ahead of the United Nations’ COP 28 Climate Summit this November and December in Dubai

A Brief News Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter and publisher Doug Draper

Posted October 5th, 2023

For the record, I am not now and never have been a member of the Catholic Church or any other church or religious group on this planet.

However, I have always had a great deal of respect for leaders or prominent members of any religious faiths who dedicate time tor the good of humankind and for all life on this one and only place in the universe we know of that is capable of sustaining us if we have the wisdom and courage to protect and preserve it.

On that front, I felt honoured as an environment reporter in the 1980s and 90s to come and to know and respect a late, a heroic Catholic nun named Sister Margeen Hoffmann who led a group in Niagara Falls, New York called the Ecumenical Taskforce and who worked with environmental groups on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border to clean up industrial dumps and effluent pipes poisoning the Niagara River and Lake Ontario.

Sister Margeen, who also worked during the latee 1970s and early 1980s to help hundreds of families flee from the chemically-contaminated Love Canal neighbourhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y,  often liked to quote the words ofSt. Frances of Assisi, a Catholic friar and environmental activist from some 900 years, that went like this, and I paraphrase; “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Now the head of the Catholic Church, who adopted the name of that ancient friar, has released a report, following a summer of record-breaking, destructive and deadly wildfires, droughts, flooding and winds and fjust ahead of an international summit on the climate crisis, that rings of that same message of taking action before we perish.

Pope Francis’ report, some 30 pages long,  delivers a a warning just like that.

‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

“The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” the report says.

“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident,” the Pope goes on to say in the report called Laudate Deum (Praise God).

“Once and for all, let us put an end to the irresponsible derision that would present this issue as something purely ecological, ‘green,’ romantic, frequently subject to ridicule by economic interests,” continues the Pope,support environmental groups he believes have been unfairly protrayed as groups that have been “radicalized.”

“In reality,” he says, these groups “are filling a space left empty by society as a whole, which ought to exercise a healthy ‘pressure’, since every family ought to realise that the future of their children is at stake.”

Unlike too many political leaders who are not doing enough or are doing little or nothing at all, these groups are struggling to bring attention to catastrophic, climate-induced disasters the Pople calls the Earth’s “cries of protest.”

To read the entire report, click on the following link – https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20231004-laudate-deum.html

A Footnote from Doug Draper at Niagara At Large – 

Finally, there was this moment a month ago at the United Nations headquarters in New York City where Canada’s Prime Minister was among those centred out for continuing to subsidies and allow the growth of more carbon-polluting energy facilities.

Indeed, the Trudeau government has been subsidizing and funding gas and oil energy projects to the tune of billions of dollars annually while saying virtually nothing about provinces like Ontario where Ford’s Conservative government is striving to build more gas-fired power plants and build more transportation systems, including multi-lane highways, that encourage are greater use of trucks and cars over public transit.

To watch a CBC report on the recent United Nations meeting where Canada is singled out as a laggard in the battle against climate change, click on the screen immediately below –

NIAGARA AT LARGE Encourages You To Join The Conversation By Sharing Your Views On This Post In The Space Following The Bernie Sanders Quote Below.

“A Politician Thinks Of The Next Election. A Leader Thinks Of The Next Generation.” – Bernie Sanders