Speaking to a group of lawyers on Friday, Pope Francis said that the Catholic Church is contemplating the introduction of “ecological sin” to the compendium of Church teaching.
“We have to introduce, we are thinking about it, in the catechism of the Catholic Church, the sin against ecology, the sin against our common home, because it’s a duty,” he said.
The pope’s words came just weeks after the conclusion of a bishops’ summit on the Amazon focused on the environmental threat to the region.
Francis was speaking to the 20th world congress of the International Association of Penal Law, held in Rome Nov. 13-16, under the scope of “Criminal Justice and Corporate Business.”
He also said that the culture of waste, combined with other widespread phenomena in welfare societies, is showing the “serious tendency to degenerate into a culture of hatred.”
“It is no coincidence that in these times, emblems and actions typical of Nazism reappear, which, with its persecutions against Jews, gypsies and people of homosexual orientation, represents the negative model par excellence of a culture of waste and hatred,” Francis said.
He also said that upon hearing some speeches from certain governments, although he didn’t give any examples, he’s “reminded of Hitler’s speeches in 1934, in 1936, [heard] today.”
“We must be vigilant, both in the civil sphere and the ecclesial context, to avoid any possible compromise – which is assumed to be involuntary – with these degenerations,” he said. – READ MORE