Pope Francis
He said there was a "very solid scientific consensus" that the planet was warming and that people had to "combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it" because greenhouse gases were "released mainly as a result of human activity."
THE ARREST OF SEVEN Catholic activists from the Plowshares movement who entered a nuclear submarine base in April again highlights the enduring threats posed by nuclear weapons. The Kings Bay Plowshares carried religious banners promoting peace onto the naval base in Georgia that houses Trident submarines armed with missiles with nuclear warheads. “This weapons system is a cocked gun being held to the head of the planet,” the activists said in a statement as they were arrested.
At a time when President Trump reportedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. would win a nuclear arms race between the two countries, nuclear disarmament efforts feel tenuous. Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, who helped broker the Iran nuclear agreement, has warned that the chance of a nuclear launch is “higher than it’s been since the Cuban missile crisis.”
Against this backdrop, the clock is ticking on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed in 2010 by President Obama and Russia’s then-President Dmitry Medvedev that limits strategic warheads and delivery systems in the two countries. Unless action is taken to extend that agreement, it will expire in 2021. If that happens, for the first time in more than 40 years the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals would operate free of an arms control agreement.
The Pentagon released a nuclear arms policy in February that requests two new types of nuclear weapons, essentially ending the Obama administration’s efforts to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis described the changes as a need to “look reality in the eye” and to “see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
A Chilean man who suffered clerical sexual abuse has said Pope Francis told him in a private conversation that God had made him gay and loved him that way, according to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
"Pope Francis has an enormous capacity to communicate. His words are simple, but clear, and from the heart. He has a great presence that comes from his honesty, his humility, his sense of humor, and his courage."
FOR THE PAST three years, Pope Francis has convened leaders of grassroots movements from around the world to extend the church’s solidarity with the poor and vulnerable on three critical themes: land, work, and housing.
This winter, a regional gathering of the World Meeting of Popular Movements met in the United States for the first time. Seven hundred grassroots leaders, accompanied by 25 U.S. Catholic bishops, several international representatives, and a delegation from the Vatican, led by Cardinal Peter Turkson, met in Modesto, Calif., with the cardinal bearing a letter of support, invitation, and challenge from Pope Francis.
To the regular themes, U.S. leaders added racism and migration. Participants addressed the pain of exclusion from the perspective of undocumented domestic workers, residents of Flint whose water was contaminated, Standing Rock water protectors, and the unhoused, while also raising the hope of united, faith-rooted, nonviolent resistance.
Racial justice, in the U.S. and abroad, was a central theme. “Why is blackness a threat in America?” asked Rev. Traci Blackmon. “And how are we, as people of color, ever to be perceived as unarmed, and therefore nonthreatening, if our blackness is the weapon that you fear?” Blackmon said that oppression, dehumanization, and racism are rooted in the original sin of desiring to be God and seeking to create God in our own image. John A. Powell, director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, added, “When you ‘other’ someone in an extreme way, then you treat them as a non-human.”
“I am a sinner. This the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”
Since the start of his papacy in 2013, conservatives have criticized Francis, accusing him of not defending moral teachings such as those on abortion, homosexuality and divorce as strongly as his predecessors.
Since his election in 2013, Francis has several times called for an worldwide ban on capital punishment, prompting criticism from Church conservatives, particularly in the United States.
Pope Francis, starting Holy Week services leading to Easter, urged young people on Sunday to keep shouting and not allow the older generations to silence their voices or anesthetize their idealism.
In his letter, former Pope Benedict disputed suggestions by conservatives that Francis' academic qualities were lacking, praising his successor as a "man of deep philosophical and theological formation" and praising an "interior continuity between the two pontificates".
The announcement follows past pushback by previous conservative popes who disapproved of Romero's leftist political views and liberation theology.
"The Holy See has to work in whatever conditions arise. We can't [always] have the society that we would like to have, or the conditions that we would like to have," he told the Catholic news agency SIR.
Pope Francis on Sunday said Syria was being "martyred" by continued attacks killing civilians in the eastern Ghouta district, calling for an immediate end to violence and access to humanitarian aid.
Pope Francis, leading Catholics into the season of Lent, urged people on Wednesday to slow down amid the noise, haste, and desire for instant gratification in a high-tech world to rediscover the power of silence.
Barros has been accused of protecting his former mentor, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, who was found guilty in a Vatican investigation in 2011 of abusing teenage boys over many years.
“Dog, cats, and motorcycles get blessings, but we’re not worth one?” Mayor Peter Hinze complained. “It can hardly be made clearer that we’re second-class people.”
Pope Francis on Wednesday condemned the "evil" of fake news, saying journalists and social media users should shun and unmask manipulative "snake tactics" that foment division to serve political and economic interests.
"The native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present," the pope told a crowd of indigenous people from more than 20 groups including the Harakbut, Esse-ejas, Shipibos, Ashaninkas, and Juni Kuin.
Pope Francis publicly expressed "pain and shame" on Tuesday over the rape and molestation of children by priests in Chile and later listened, prayed, and cried at a private meeting with victims.
"Nuclear weapons must be banned," Francis said, quoting a document issued by Pope John XXIII at the height of the Cold War and adding that there is "no denying that the conflagration could be started by some chance and unforeseen circumstance".