Saint Peter's: a Basilica Desecrated - by Roberto de Mattei

St. Peter’s: a Basilica Desecrated

Roberto de Mattei

Corrispondenza Romana
11th December 2015

The image that will remain tied to the opening of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy is not the anti-triumphalist ceremony celebrated by Pope Francis on the morning of December 8th, but the pretentious spectacle Fiat Lux: Illuminating Our Common Home, which brought the day to a close, by inundating the façade and Dome of St. Peter’s with lights and sounds.

For Pope's Environment Encyclical, an unusual line-up of presenters for official Vatican press conference, including climate change radical.

The Vatican has just revealed in today's Bollettino the line-up of speakers for the official presentation of the "Environment Encyclical", Laudato Si, on June 18 at the New Synod Hall.

- Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace;


- His Eminence Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, representing the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Orthodox Church;


- Prof. John Schellnhuber, Founding Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Metropolitan John, 84 years old, is the Patriarchate of Constantinople's leading figure in ecumenical discussions and has long been close to the Catholic ecumenical establishment. However this is the first time that an Orthodox metropolitan would be officially co-presenting a papal Encyclical. There are reports that the Encyclical will draw upon the teaching of Patriarch Bartholomew (whose interest in environmental issues is well known) and that there was even a proposal -- which proved to be "not possible" -- that the Encyclical be jointly promulgated by both the Pope and the Patriarch. 

Perhaps of far greater interest to most of our readership would be the presence of Prof. Schellnhuber on the panel. The father of the "two-degree target" to stave off global warming, he is the founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany (which is funded by the German government), Chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was one of the experts (alongside Jeffrey Sachs) tapped by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences to write their joint statement on climate change published in April of this year, titled "Climate change and the common good: a statement of the problem and the demand for transformative solutions". A description of the final document's call for a "zero-carbon world" can be found here; the final published version seems to have been removed from the official website Pontifical Academy of Sciences, but to our knowledge has never been retracted.