Pope's climate change encyclical leaks

An Italian magazine on Monday posted an early draft version of Pope Francis’ highly anticipated environment encyclical, a move that a Vatican official denounced as a "heinous act." L'Espresso posted the 192-page Italian language document on Monday, four days before the Vatican is planning to release the public version. According to the National Catholic Reporter, the text is an early draft of the encyclical, which is expected to make a moral case for taking on climate change. A Vatican official told Bloomberg News that the leak is "heinous act," and a spokesman said news organizations should not report on the document until the final version comes out at noon in Rome on Thursday.  In the draft, the pope says that human activity is driving climate change, according to a translation by Crux, a Boston Globe website focused on the Catholic issues.  The encyclical calls for “changes in styles of life, of production and consumption, to combat this warming, or, at least, the human causes that produce and exacerbate it.” Francis writes that the Earth “protests for the evil that we’ve caused due to irresponsible use and abuse” of natural resources. He calls for a greater focus on a “sustainable and integral form of development” to combat climate change in the future. “We grew up thinking we were the earth’s owners and dominators, authorized to pillage it,” Francis writes. “Violence in the human heart wounded by sin shows itself also in the symptoms of disease that we see in the soil, the water, the air and living creatures.” The document calls climate change “one of the principal challenges now facing humanity," according to Crux, and it asks readers to accept that it's actually happening. “It’s enough to look at reality with sincerity to see that there’s a great deterioration in our common home,” the encyclical says. The encyclical, titled "Laudato Si, On the care of the common home,” comes ahead of a major international climate conference later this year...more