Ground prepared for Paris conference

Catholic bishops of the EU met in Paris last week to discuss the UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP 21, to be held in the French capital from 30 November to 11 December, write Tom Heneghan and Michael Sean Winters. Cardinal Reinhard Marx,  president of the COMECE group of EU bishops’ conferences, said Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical last June, Laudato si’, had helped rally Catholics to the environmental cause.

“For the first time, I can see that the whole Church is mobilised for this political event,” he said, and  presented an appeal signed by heads of the regional bishops’ conferences for governments to agree to limit global temperature increases “to within those parameters currently suggested [by] the global scientific community”.

n Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras said at Georgetown University in the US that politicians, businesspeople and all sectors of society must “promote the common good of our common home” to avoid environmental catastrophes.