Jeb Bush on Tuesday became the second Catholic Republican presidential candidate to play down Pope Francis’ encyclical on care for the environment.
The encyclical Laudato Si’ links climate change to human behaviour, and calls for drastic reductions in carbon emissions especially by big business, according to reports of a leaked draft of the document.
As he began his campaign trail in a town hall event in New Hampshire, the younger brother of George W Bush said: "I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don’t get my economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my Pope."
Mr Bush, a former Florida governor, said that religion "ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting into the political realm." He added that he did not think the science on climate change was "complete".
Vice President Joseph Biden, also a Catholic, mentioned the papal document at a clean energy conference at the White House on Tuesday, saying usually encyclicals “are only issued on what the Church thinks are incredibly important initiatives.”
He said there was a growing consensus about the need to fight climate change, and said, "This doesn't only have a moral component to it, it has a security component to it, as well as an economic component."
Mr Bush is not the only Republican presidential candidate to have distanced himself from the encyclical. Earlier this month Rick Santorum told a US radio show: “The Church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we're really good at, which is theology and morality. When we get involved with political and controversial scientific theories, I think the Church is not as forceful and credible."
Mr Bush made his comments as research from the Pew Research Center found that while 71 per cent of US Catholics believe the earth is getting warmer, only 47 per cent attribute that warming to human activity. Some 62 per cent of Catholic Democrats believe global warming is caused by human activity, but only 24 of Catholic Republicans agree.
Meanwhile in Britain, secular commentators looked forward to the encyclical. The Financial Times described it as “a welcome message that defines the global challenge in moral terms”, while the environmental campaigner George Monbiot in the Guardian said it marked “a potential turning point” whereby people can be persuaded to care for the planet not out of economic concerns but out of love for the living world.
Above: Jeb Bush. Photo: CNS/Reuters
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