The Washington Post is enjoying making Republicans struggle with the new Vatican document on the environment. On Friday’s front page, Post reporter Karen Tumulty highlighted how the new encylical “poses a dilemma for GOP hopefuls” and channeled Rush Limbaugh’s view that Pope Francis is encouraging all Democrats to vote Democrat for a climate change solution.
Catholic politicians face a balancing act, given the popularity of a pope who had an approval rating of 86 percent among U.S. Catholics and 64 percent among Americans overall in a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center.
Tumulty’s article was first a blog post headlined “Republican presidential hopefuls on the hot seat, thanks to Pope Francis; His encyclical on the environment is the latest of the pontiff's stands to be at odds with Republican dogma.”
She added that on June 15, “several prominent Catholic clerics - including Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, who is said to be one of the pope's closest U.S. confidants - appeared at a daylong conference at the AFL-CIO's Washington headquarters aimed at forging a closer working relationship between the church and labor unions.” Liberal journalists enjoy the Catholic hierarchy when they hobnob and praise Democratic constituency groups.
On Sunday, the Washington Post published a front-pager headlined “Climate doubters unable to stop pope.” Reporters Anthony Faiola and Chris “The Republican War on Science” Mooney reported the "determined pontiff" had taken a step "backing the science behind human-driven global warming."
They recounted an incident where Vatican officials kept a French skeptic out of a meeting: “The incident highlights how climate-change doubters tried and failed to alter the landmark papal document unveiled last week — one that saw the leader of 1 billion Catholics fuse faith and reason and come to the conclusion that ‘denial’ is wrong.”
Inside the paper, the unsubtle Post headline was “For climate-change doubters vs. pope, ‘this was their Waterloo’.” The skeptics were opponents of the “reform” train.
It marked the latest blow for those seeking to stop the reform-minded train that has become Francis’s papacy. It is one that has reinvigorated liberal Catholics even as it has sowed the seeds of resentment and dissent inside and outside the Vatican’s ancient walls.
Yet the battle lost over climate change also suggests how hard it may be for critics to blunt the power of a man who has become something of a juggernaut in an institution where change tends to unfold over decades, even centuries. More than anything, to those who doubt the human impact of global warming, the position staked out by Francis in his papal document, known as an encyclical, means a major defeat.
“This was their Waterloo,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, who has been tracking climate-change deniers for years. “They wanted the encyclical not to happen. And it happened.”
The Post did not explain Davies worked for many years for Greenpeace, or ask Davies who exactly is Napoleon going into exile over this encyclical.
