Pope Preaches Green and Practices What He Preaches
By NunoXEI • Apr 30th, 2008 • Category: Blog
Under Pope Benedict, the Roman Catholic Church has taken steps to set examples of how to be green for its followers—about a fifth of the world’s population—and the rest of the world.
In July 2007 the church accepted an offer by a Hungarian start-up company to plant trees in Hungary to offset the carbon footprint of Vatican City—the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted by the tiny state.
The move is intended to make Vatican the world’s first carbon-neutral country—though it has increasing competition for the honor.
Vatican engineers are also installing solar panels on the roof of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
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NunoXEI is Co-Founder of TheGreenRocket.com and self proclaimed internet-surfing-guru. You can find his personal blog at NunoXEI.com, the home of his podcast, The Lowdown, his comic-related properties and his webcomic, Republic Domain.
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The Roman Catholic church has always done an impressive job of adopting “the next big thing”. This is not meant to offend any of the religious persuasions, but many iconographies of early Catholicism had already existed within Roman and Green pantheon lore. There are many examples of adoption I don’t need to get into concerning that aspect of why Catholicism grew rapidly.
What impresses me even further with this new pope is his willingness to not only be actively aware of the world’s circumstances, but also his ability to make a stand on where he believes the Roman Catholic Church needs to stand on said world issues.
Not only is he taking an active role to have the Vatican be the FIRST carbon-neutral country–he’s voicing an opinion about stem-cell research, cloning and other “questionable” scientific practices and how they shouldn’t be stopped, but continued with a humanitarian and ethical vision kept in mind.
This is the kind of pope that can re-enlighten the religious masses under the Roman Catholic banner once again!
Awesome indeed. Pope Benedict is certainly living out his responsibilities as a role model! He has taken some more radical moves than past Popes, which I respect – starting with establishing a relationship with the Muslim community and including his action on current global events.
One my twitter friends brought up the idea of the pope mobile – anyone know about its emissions?