Catholics Mobilize on Climate Change

According to Coral Davenport, Republican presidential candidates aren't just going to be hearing about climate change from the Pope.

As the steamy hurricane season descends on Miami, the city’s Roman Catholic archbishop, Thomas G. Wenski, is planning a summer of sermons, homilies and press events designed to highlight the threat that a warming planet, rising sea levels and more extreme storms pose to his community’s poorest and most vulnerable...

Archbishop Wenski will repeat those messages in his sermons, and he hopes that they will resonate with two members of his flock in particular: Florida’s junior senator, Marco Rubio, and former Gov. Jeb Bush, both Catholics and both Republican presidential candidates...

Florida is not the only crucial presidential state where Catholic bishops will push the pope’s climate message. In Iowa, the bishops of Des Moines and Davenport are planning a news media event at a wind turbine manufacturing facility, where they will highlight findings that climate change drives the drought and floods that plague Iowa farmers. The bishops of Cincinnati and of Las Cruces, N.M., are also planning news conferences and events for the coming weeks. The bishop of Sacramento, in a state in the grips of a record drought, is planning an event highlighting the link to climate change.

Davenport points out that most of these activities are being planned by the Catholic Climate Covenant, a group that is also engaged in media and letter-writing campaigns. Apparently these folks aren't buying Jeb's position that, when it comes to climate change, the church should stay out of politics.  That whole argument lost it's legs a long time ago when, as Governor, he brought the entire Florida government into the very difficult discussion among family members about the tragic situation with Terry Shiavo.

I'm thinking that the most important position on the campaigns of these Republican candidates will be  their event planner/coordinator. That's because protecting their candidates from a public with whom they are increasingly out of step on issues like immigration and climate change is going to be a major challenge.