From the headlines, you would think that Pope Francis just schooled President Trump in a heated debate on climate change at the Vatican.
Earlier today, the website Mashable published an article called “Pope Francis just threw some serious papal shade at Donald Trump.” The title of an opinion piece on Esquire read “In Which the Pope Expertly Trolls Trump on Climate.”
The Hill went with something a bit more subtle: “Pope gives letter on climate change during vatican meeting.”
But the letter, or “message,” that Pope Francis gave the president during his visit to the Vatican is far from a manifesto on climate change -- it is his recent encyclical Laudato Si. An encyclical is a letter from the Pope to Catholics on faith and morals, and are not necessarily infallible or even strictly binding teachings. And as Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey pointed out in a tweet, “Laudato Si was about more than climate change. Also economics and gender identity.”
Yes, in the same encyclical that he gave to Trump, Pope Francis addressed transgenderism by warning that “thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.” But you won’t see that mentioned in any of the articles above.
But of course, the media are trying to push the narrative that Pope Francis is making a political statement on Trump’s recent executive order undoing an Obama EPA initiative. The initiative, called the Climate Action Plan, would have cost the coal industry hundreds of thousands of jobs and over $1.47 trillion by 2030, according to the Heritage Foundation. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that in doing away with this initiative, Trump followed the Pope’s post-election call to continue looking out for “the poor, the outcast and those in need.”
Not everything the Pope does is about climate change. But of course, to many on the left, everything is about climate change.