Rome Newsroom, Jan 27, 2021 / 07:04 am
A Vatican official has encouraged Catholics to apply the Church's social teaching to evaluate proposals for a "Green New Deal."
Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, reflected on topic in a Jan. 23 guest lecture for a course organized by the Centesimus Annus pro Pontifice Foundation on "The Church's Social Doctrine for a Green New Deal."
He pointed out that the philosophical underpinnings of some Green New Deal proposals contained a modern assumption that technological progress inevitably yields good results.
He said: "The Green New Deal and similar plans do not question either the industrial system, which historically is at the origin of pollution or the financial system of international stock exchanges, but are rather programs that tend to respond to economic dynamics that deal with the environmental problem, directly and indirectly, with electric and autonomous vehicles, various other forms of ecological industry, information technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and 5G technology, just to name some particularly relevant examples."