An excellent place to bring opposing sides together to discuss climate change and global warming and though a little heat was in evidence, the beginning of two sides finding congruence might have started.
In the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2000 report “Care for Creation: Human Activity and the Environment” they said: “Care for the environment is ultimately a call to respect all of creation and to assure that human activity, while transforming the earth, does not destroy the dynamic balance which exists among all living things that depend in turn on land, air and water for their every existence. The environmental issue has become central to social, economic and political thought precisely because of the growing degradation, which often strikes in a particularly severe way the poorer sectors of society. The risk of climate change and the growing number of natural disasters call into question the present course of modern society.” (p. 7)
VATICAN LETTER Apr-27-2007 (960 words) Backgrounder. xxxi
Mirroring wider debate, Vatican seminar on global warming gets heated
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Despite being held in a cool, climate-controlled conference room, some early discussions at a Vatican-sponsored seminar on global warming and climate change got pretty heated.
The rifts and tensions still dividing the global debate on the causes of and remedies for drastic climatic shifts were gently simmering in the small microcosm of the two-day Vatican meeting.
The seminar, sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, gathered some 80 experts representing the scientific, political, economic and spiritual sides of the climate-change debate at the Vatican April 26-27 to discuss "Climate Change and Development."
"I have to commend the planners," said Lucia Silecchia, a professor of environmental law at The Catholic University of America in Washington, because "nobody can accuse them of bringing in a group of people who will agree with each other."
Disagreements even spilled out into the corridor during the closed-door seminar's first morning break when a Vatican official had to use his pastoral prowess to calm one participant.
"The scientific community has been so divided and so bitter" over the climate-change debate that experts who disagree with each other don't talk to each other, Silecchia told Catholic News Service.
But by bringing the opposing sides together under the neutral roof of the Vatican, she said, the church is helping give a fresh approach to an issue mired in conflict, confusion and, often, inaction.
The Vatican is reminding people that the environment and development cannot be helped by economics, science or politics alone, "that there are moral, ethical considerations" to take into account, said Silecchia.
She said policymakers have to avoid falling into the extremes that either see "the human almost as evil and destroying a beautiful planet" or consider development and technology as saviors of the world.
