Thursday 18 May 2017

Vatican bishop predicts Pope will convert Trump…on climate change



Pope Francis says he won’t “proselytize” during his meeting with Trump next week, but one Vatican bishop insists the pope will indeed convert him on one thing: climate change.

Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the influential and controversial chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academies of Science and Social Sciences, made the claim in an interview published Monday by ANSA.

"They will come to an agreement, since the president claims to be a Christian, and so he will listen to him,” Sorondo said.

Pope Francis is set to receive Trump the morning of May 24 at the Apostolic Palace.

The two leaders have taken radically divergent positions on climate change.

The pope has made the issue a hallmark of his pontificate, most prominently in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’. The pope has strongly endorsed the claim that humans are in large part responsible for climate change.

Trump, on the other hand, is skeptical of manmade climate change. During the presidential campaign, he promised to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord. He signed an executive order in late March undoing much of the environmental legislation put in place by former President Barack Obama. He ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to remove the climate change page from its website. And he appointed an EPA critic, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, to head the agency.

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