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I respond that I am not here to broker a merger between the secular climate movement and the Vatican. However, if Pope Francis is correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model—and I think he is correct—then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes, one capable of navigating political disagreements.

Pope Francis is a reform-driven pope that has huge popularity with rank-and-file Catholics who have hungered for a figure to transcend an age of scandal. But, does even a powerful and popular pope have the power to change church doctrine? The advancing story line of Francis’s papacy is how far can a pope go in making reforms against an embedded culture of cardinals and bishops who are averse to change?

Pope Francis broke with Catholic tradition Monday by declaring that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real, and remarking that God is not “a magician with a magic wand.” “When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” the pope said at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, during a plenary meeting dedicated to evolving concepts of nature.

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When you bend the rules to favor the wealthy, they never give back. Francis knows this because it is how Argentina, and much of Latin America, has been run for centuries.

It is safe to assume that Pope Francis knows very well that the Catholic Church supported the military coup and dictatorship of General Franco in Spain. In this light, the recent service honoring the members of the Church who fell during the Spanish Civil War on the fascist side casts doubt on what motivated the silence of Bishop Bergolio (Pope Francis) during the Argentinian coup.

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