By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service and staff writers
Pope Francis has highlighted the plight of millions of people forced from their homes due to climate change and environmental destruction, and has called on Catholics to assist them.
In the preface to a new Vatican booklet, Francis wrote “When people are driven out because their local environment has become uninhabitable, it might look like a process of nature, something inevitable… Yet the deteriorating climate is very often the result of poor choices and destructive activity, of selfishness and neglect, that set humankind at odds with creation, our common home.”
The booklet “Pastoral Orientations on Climate Displaced People,” was released yesterday by the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
Responding to climate crisis, the booklet explains it is “at the heart of being a credible and witnessing Church” and it calls on dioceses across the world to help those who have been displaced, raise awareness of the issue and lobby governments.
The booklet offers a list of recommendations on how to influence policy-making given it describes government policies and programs on those who are displaced as “often inadequate, short-sighted and influenced by economic concerns”.
Recommendations include that priests and parish leaders “speak more directly and clearly” about “our reasons for loving and accepting all our brothers and sisters” and for each bishops’ conference to set up a special commission for immigrants led by a national director.
The booklet encourages Catholics to study and track climate change and to change their lifestyles to help mitigate some of its effects.
“The climate crisis has been unfolding since the Industrial Revolution,” Pope Francis wrote.
“For a long time, it developed so slowly that it remained imperceptible except to a very few clairvoyants.
“Even now it is uneven in its impact: climate change happens everywhere, but the greatest pain is felt by those who have contributed the least to it.
“The huge and increasing numbers (of people) displaced by climate crises are fast becoming a great emergency.”
According to the booklet, “In the course of 2019 alone, more than 33 million people were newly displaced, bringing the total number to almost 51 million, the highest number ever recorded; and of these, 8.5 million (were displaced) as a result of conflict and violence and 24.9 million due to natural disasters.”
“In the first half of 2020, 14.6 million new displacements were recorded; 9.8 million as a result of disasters and 4.8 million associated with conflict and violence,” the booklet said, citing statistics from the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
In addition, it said, climate change is “a threat multiplier, intensifying existing conflicts where resources are scarce.”
Responding to the needs of people displaced within their home countries or forced to migrate because of climate-related catastrophes is “at the heart of being a credible and witnessing church, a caring and inclusive ecclesial community,” the booklet said.
Many people either do not know about the human cost of climate change or refuse to believe it, the text said.
“Blindness about these issues is widespread and its causes are mainly: a) plain ignorance; b) indifference and selfishness vis-à-vis phenomena that endanger the common good; c) the purposeful denial of reality to protect vested interests; d) misunderstanding.”
“God gives the means to see, but human beings must be willing to journey from blindness to awareness,” the document said, which is why many of the suggestions in the text involve education at all levels of the church, ecumenical and interreligious cooperation in sensitizing people to the issues and in responding to the needs of people displaced by climate crises and listening to and advocating for the real needs of displaced people and those threatened with displacement.
Presenting the booklet during an online news conference on March 30, Salesian Father Joshtrom Kureethadam, an official at the dicastery, said, “Climate crisis and other ecological hazards are becoming the primary drivers for displacement, and could re-shape patterns of migration in the coming decades.”
The crisis, he said, “is ultimately a moral problem. The poor and vulnerable communities whose carbon emissions are only a fraction of those of the rich world are already the early and disproportionate victims of the crisis.”
Cardinal Michael Czerny, undersecretary for migrants and refugees, was asked to clarify the moral teaching behind the booklet.
“I don’t think the moral argument needs to be any more complex” than that all human beings were created by God, are brothers and sisters to each other and are living on the same planet. They have an obligation to each other and to the earth, Cardinal Czerny said.
“We really seem to be at the point of deciding, actively or passively, whether we will take care of the one home we have or we destroy it.”
