Pope Francis' recent Encyclical was not merely in support of environmentalism. In declaring "environmental sin" as a sin of humanity, he not only got the science of global warming right, he created a new form of Catholicism, with no mention of individual salvation or personal responsibility or getting into Heaven. He re-metaphorized God and the Trinity. No God as King on a throne in Heaven with Jesus as Lord. He presents a metaphor that remakes Christianity: God as the life-giving source (Nature) and Jesus as the life given (the natural world and all life in it), with the Holy Spirit as love (empathy and nurturance) suffusing the world. He attacks market fundamentalism (the unfettered "free market"), in which rich countries and corporations benefit from the poverty of the poor. He speaks of the earth as "our home" and nature as our mother. He speaks of moral debt, the debt of the owed by the northern hemisphere countries to the countries of the southern hemisphere.
I have recently started a Citizens' Communication Network for progressives called Reframe America. The website is reframeamerica.com. The paper on the Pope's reframing of Catholicism in the service of saving the planet from global warming, is at:
http://reframeamerica.com/...
Feel free to download it or to send friends to the reframe website.
Take care,
George