Vatican laments inclusion of ‘reproductive rights’ in UN resolution on coronavirus

Washington D.C., Oct 11, 2017 / 12:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After the Trump administration announced a repeal of emissions standards, Catholic leaders warned it could hurt poor communities and thwart long-term efforts to fight climate change.

“Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato si’, calls us to action in caring for our common home. A national carbon standard is a critical step for the U.S. at this time,” Bishop Frank Dewane of Venice, chair of the U.S. bishops’ domestic justice and human development committee, stated Oct. 10 after the Environmental Protection Agency announced a planned repeal of the Clean Power Plan.
Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced the repeal on Monday.

The Clean Power Plan, finalized in 2015 under the Obama administration, set goals for states to reduce carbon emissions from the utility sector, ultimately aiming to cut emissions by 32 percent by 2030.

President Obama announced the plan in August 2015, citing the need to curb pollution amid climate change and to reduce domestic health concerns such as asthma rates.

“By some estimates, a fully implemented Clean Power Plan could have prevented: 2,700 to 6,600 premature deaths; 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children; and 2,700 to 2,800 hospital admissions,” the Catholic Climate Covenant, a national partnership that seeks to educate Catholics about Church teaching on the environment, said.

The plan was “an important step forward to protect the health of all people,” then-chair of the U.S. bishops’ domestic justice and human development committee, Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, stated.

However, in February 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the plan being put into effect. President Trump ordered a review of it with the possibility of rescinding the plan in his executive order on energy independence in March, and Bishop Dewane warned that the order “effectively dismantles the Clean Power Plan.”

Pruitt, in a March 30 letter to state governors, told them that in light of the Supreme Court’s stay on the plan, they did not have to abide by the goals and standards set by the plan.

“It is the policy of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that States have no obligation to spend resources to comply with a Rule that has been stayed by the Supreme Court of the United States,” Pruitt wrote. “The days of coercive federalism are over.”

On Monday, Pruitt announced the plan would be repealed, to the disappointment of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Climate Covenant.

The chief fault of Tuesday’s announcement was that there is no sufficient replacement plan, Catholic Climate Covenant said.

Furthermore, coming on the heels of the U.S. pulling out of the international Paris climate agreement, where participating countries pledged to cut pollution and contribute to the Green Climate Fund, the repeal “solidifies the already troubling approach of our nation in addressing climate change,” Bishop Dewane said.

Recent Popes along with bishops from all over the globe “have all accepted the reality of human-forced climate change,” Dan Misleh, executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, stated on Tuesday. “And we know that our burning of fossil fuels is among the biggest contributors to this moral dilemma.”

The Clean Power Plan offered “flexibility to allow states to meet carbon reduction targets in meaningful ways,” he said. “This repeal now throws all of these potential gains into question.”

Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, on care for our common home, specifically called for policies to reduce carbon emissions, he added.

In paragraph 26 of the encyclical, Pope Francis warned that “some of the negative impacts of climate change … will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption.”

“There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy,” the encyclical stated.

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A woman attends a rally for Mark Houck outside the James A. Byrne United States Courthouse in Philadelphia on Jan. 24, 2023, while holding a sign that says “Justice for Mark Houck!” / Joe Bukuras/CNA

Philadelphia, Pa., Jan 24, 2023 / 16:00 pm (… […]

Denver Newsroom, Oct 21, 2020 / 12:16 am (CNA).- An annual cultural festival hosted by a Catholic group of artists and intellectuals is being held virtually this month, offering opportunities for encounter and discussion through art and creativity.

The Revolution of Tenderness – which draws its name from an exhortation of Pope Francis – is in the middle of hosting its eighth Festival of Friendship. The project brings together a myriad of people from different cultures and belief systems.

“The Festival of Friendship is an annual free cultural event that is open to the public; it features speakers and topics to do with every aspect of human ingenuity and creativity: from the arts and humanities, to sports, to science, to politics and economics, to education, to research, to any and all expressions of human culture,” said Suzanne Lewis, coordinator for Revolution of Tenderness.

“We place a special emphasis on dialogue; thus we invite speakers who belong to many different religions (or none), and we explore subjects of interest to Catholics and non-Catholics alike,” she told CNA.

The festival is modeled after the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, an annual cultural festival held in Italy’s coastal town of Rimini. This event, which is also free, attracts over 800,000 visitors each year. Lewis was so moved by attending the Rimini meeting that she decided to replicate the experience in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Steubenville, Ohio.

“My collaborators and I have not made any attempts to innovate on the model I first witnessed in Rimini. In fact, all our efforts to do with the festival have been motivated by a desire to imitate the meeting as faithfully as possible while providing the fewest possible ‘translations’ for an American audience,” she said.

The first festival was established in 2012 and called The Pittsburgh Encounter. The nonprofit, Revolution of Tenderness, was then established in 2017. As the nonprofit developed, the organization has been able to further other initiatives, including literary workshops, conferences, and classes.

Normally, the Festival of Friendship is carried out one autumn week in Pittsburgh. In addition to Catholics from a variety of professions, it has also hosted jazz musicians, Buddhist monks, Islamic scholars, and medical professionals. About 500 people attended last year’s event.

This year, the event is being held in online sessions every Thursday through Sunday in October. It showcases music, poetry, cinematography, lectures, panel discussions, and keynote talks.

While the online format has drawn a smaller-than-typical audience, Lewis said it has been a very positive experience.

“We decided to spread our offerings over the course of a month, and to give our audience days off to rejuvenate before tuning in for the next event of the festival,” she said, adding that they have seen “several unexpected positive side effects from moving online.”

One benefit has been the “extraordinary opportunity to engage with artists, speakers, musicians, academics, and audience members from across the country and around the world.”

“While we long for the warm, human embrace and conviviality that our past, in-person festivals have become famous for, we’ve seen signs, already, that the online, multi-week format has been able to open the door for an even larger community of friends to discover together what it means to be ‘found’ and truly embraced, despite the limits of physical separation,” she said.

This Friday, the festival will host “To Live In A Sea Of Happiness” – a samba concert that seeks to convey discovery and hope. The music, born in the poverty of Brazil, is an expression of joy and hope performed through music and dance, according to organizers. It will be performed by Ney Vasconcelos, Antonio Gomes, and Marcelo Rocha.

That same day, the festival will also host “Every Separation is a Link: Being Found Behind Bars,” a discussion on how inmates are “found” in prison. It will include discussions with professionals such as Dr. Louis Mendoza, director of the Pen Project, a program that connects maximum-security inmates to Arizona State University students; and Ron Zeilinger, the founder of Dismas Ministry, a Catholic prison ministry based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Elisabeth Kramp is the editor-in-chief of Revolution of Tenderness’ biannual journal Convivium and was one of the performers at last week’s event, “From Whence Springs a Boundless Fruitfulness.” Kramp recited poems, along with several other authors including Ewa Chrusciel and Suzanne M. Wolfe.

“This year I made a recording of myself reading in my study,” she told CNA. “In giving a reading, I hope the language I use incites listeners’ imaginations. Poetry is a way of knowing, and I’m all the richer when, through poetry, I see or sense the world in new ways. That’s why I write it, and that’s what I hope is transferred in a reading.”

She said the author and poets were able to place their own spin on interpreting the theme, “boundless fruitfulness.” For herself, she said fruitfulness inspired questions about the fruits of labor, fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the impact of language, especially as a literary artist.

“Language conveys so much of that fruit, the way that we strive to make beauty, the way that we patiently toil for words, not necessarily for books and publication, but for the sharing of ideas,” she said.

Kramp described her experience as an artist during the pandemic. Putting together an issue of Convivium, she was able to read a variety of submissions from artists across the world, including poems submitted from Nigeria, Wales, France, and Siberia.

“How strange that a small journal could connect me to so many in a time when I very occasionally left my home,” she reflected. “And the work on the journal knits my collaborators and I together in friendship – in spite of our being far flung across the U.S. This work has been a reminder that artistic collaboration fosters friendship, even though the overt goal is to produce the work of art.”

Lewis said efforts such as the Festival of Friendship are particularly important today, given the tension and division in society.

“In a time of increasing division and polarization, when dialogue often seems impossible among opposing camps (both inside and outside the Church), we bring diverse people together to look for what is true and useful and enduring in every discipline and topic imaginable,” she said. “We want to recover the art of authentic and convivial debate, and we want to share this gift with others.”

“Many in the Church spend enormous resources and time answering questions that no one is asking,” she continued.

“We need first to develop a capacity for listening, so that we might hear the questions, articulated and unspoken, that our fellow human beings, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, wrestle with, and then we need to do the work of discovering, within the daily realities and the fabric of ordinary life, how our own priceless inheritance answers those questions in very particular and unique ways.”

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