Former Vice President Al Gore is once again praising Pope Francis for “leading the world toward constructive climate action,” celebrating the pontiff’s 3-year-old global warming encyclical.
“Virtually all of my Catholic colleagues and friends are thrilled to the marrow of their bones that he is providing this kind of spiritual leadership. As am I,” Gore told Vatican News in an interview on Wednesday.
“Pope Francis’s leadership has been an inspiration to all of us across the world, particularly when it comes to his strong and repeated emphasis on solving the climate crisis. I am grateful for and in awe of the clarity of the moral force he embodies,” Gore said.
This is not the first time Gore has praised the pope’s global warming advocacy. In fact, Gore told CNN in 2017 that “because of Pope Francis, I really could become a Catholic.” (RELATED: Is Scott Pruitt Really On His Way Out? Let’s Look At The Evidence)
Gore is again heaping praises on Francis, who issued his Laudato Si encyclical in 2015, which addressed the issue of global warming. The encyclical was released about six months ahead of the Paris Agreement.
“He also speaks in the most powerful way about the most vulnerable among us — the poor — and helps all who listen to understand how they are uniquely affected by the climate crisis,” Gore told Vatican News.
“In particular, his papal encyclical, Laudato Si, marked a crucial step for the Catholic church in leading the world to commit to addressing the climate crisis ahead of the Paris Agreement,” Gore said.
But does Gore really understand the pope’s Laudato Si encyclical?
While the 184-page encyclical addresses environmental issues, it also takes a broader look at the idea of “human ecology” that doesn’t seem to fit Gore’s or the Democratic Party’s views.
Francis wrote that “valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different.”
“It is not a healthy attitude which would seek ‘to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it,'” the pope wrote.
Democratic politicians, however, support taxpayer funding of gender-reassignment surgeries for military service members. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, also ordered that insurers cover gender-reassignment surgeries.
In another instance, Francis says “concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion.” Francis is arguing that care for nature, or creation, should extend to the unborn, contradicting the Democratic Party’s support for abortion.
Gore himself supports abortion and even opposed Republican efforts to ban partial-birth abortions. When running for president in 2000, Gore supported using Medicaid dollars to fund abortions.
“How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?” Francis asked in his 2015 encyclical.
Francis goes on to lay out an argument against the use of contraceptives to control population growth. Francis says to “blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.”
“It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption,” he wrote.
Gore has pushed “fertility management” as a way to control population growth and fight global warming.
“Depressing the rate of child mortality, educating girls, empowering women and making fertility management ubiquitously available — so women can choose how many children and the spacing of children — is crucial to the future shape of human civilization,” Gore said at the World Economic Forum in 2014.
That’s totally incompatible with Francis’s encyclical.
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