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A boy sat near a destroyed house at the scene of a landslide following torrential rains near the University of Kinshasa in Congo in 2019. Many climate scientists have associated an increased number of natural disasters and their severity with climate change.
A boy sat near a destroyed house at the scene of a landslide following torrential rains near the University of Kinshasa in Congo in 2019. Many climate scientists have associated an increased number of natural disasters and their severity with climate change.
Photo Credit: Kenny Katombe | Reuters

Vatican calls for action to assist people displaced by climate change

Pope Francis wrote that the greatest pain from climate change ‘is felt by those who have contributed the least to it’

VATICAN CITY — Whether people admit it or not, climate change and environmental destruction are forcing millions from their homes, and Catholics have a responsibility to assist them, Pope Francis wrote in the preface to a new document.

“When people are driven out because their local environment has become uninhabitable, it might look like a process of nature, something inevitable,” the pope wrote. “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 papal preface appears in “Pastoral Orientations on Climate Displaced People,” a document released March 30 by the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

In addition to offering parishes, dioceses and national bishops’ conferences suggestions for offering pastoral care to people forced to move because of rising sea levels, desertification and increasingly strong storms, the document 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 pope wrote. “The huge and increasing numbers (of people) displaced by climate crises are fast becoming a great emergency.”

According to the document, “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 document said, citing statistics from the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.

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 document 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.

Read the document at www.stlreview.com/31A6qMv

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