Pope Francis urges a ‘culture of care’ to repair the global environment

During his visit to the US, Pope Francis told a joint session of Congress that now is the time for "courageous actions and strategies" to protect nature. The question is, will his words make any difference to a Congress that has yet to take any action on climate change?

Former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina believes they might.

“This is possibly one of a series of turning points where we expand the constituency for action,” he says. “Climate change has been a conversation started by the environmental left. It's a conversation that conservatives don't feel so comfortable entering. But when you have a very conservative institution, the Catholic Church, entering the conversation, it brings an opening … for others of conservative faith who agree with the Pope on many things. … So it could be a game changer in that it's adding new people to the conversation.”

While the pope was careful not to antagonize those who disagree with him on this issue, Inglis feels the Pope's message was still clear — especially in that he connected care of the planet with a broader 'culture of care' that includes combating poverty and restoring dignity to the excluded.

“When it comes to action on climate change, it's mostly a matter of the heart,” Inglis says. “The head's very clear on climate change. The science is pretty clear. The economics are even clearer that there is a very easy answer, which is just eliminate all the subsidies for all the fuels. Attach all the costs to all the fuels and the free enterprise system will sort it out.”

Inglis is executive director of RepublicEn, a group devoted to “building public understanding of free enterprise and its promise to solve energy and climate challenges.” He believes the pope’s appeal to the business community was a good approach.

“I think he was definitely on to something when he was talking about the ‘spirit of enterprise’ and congratulating America on that,” Inglis says. “That may have been a way of reaching the crucial constituency for action, which is actually conservatives in America.”

The pope did say, however, that there is a right and proper way to use natural resources, a view that many conservatives, including most of the GOP presidential candidates, believe places unnecessary limits on the capitalist system in the US. Inglis sides with the pope.

“I think that the pope is actually right to question capitalism, unrestrained by Judeo-Christian ethic,” Inglis says. “If it's not restrained, then capitalism is really a pretty lousy system.”

“Communism might be better because at least it starts with the fiction that we're all going to share and share alike,” Inglis says. “Now, it never works out that way. But the strong message is biblical accountability — making it so that I can't do on my property something that harms your property.”

“The specific application to climate change, of course, is that currently, fossil fuels are allowed to ‘socialize’ their soot,” Inglis continues. “It means that if I make electricity from fossil fuels, I'm able just to dump into the trash dump of the sky, foul up other people's lungs, foul up their property.”

The pope is on solid ground when he speaks of that kind of accountability, Inglis insists.

“If he puts it into the context of ‘creation care,’ that’s a fine place to put it. If he wants to expand that and say that that's protection of life itself, he’d be correct in that; and it is, in fact, pro-life to talk about sustainability in that way. … We have to preserve a sustainable system in order to have life on this beautiful planet that we've been given,” Inglis concludes.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood