"The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits," said Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga. Pope Francis aide blasts U.S. climate skeptics

The pope’s closest adviser on Tuesday slammed climate-change skeptics, blaming capitalist motivations from “movements in the United States” for opposing the Catholic Church leader’s upcoming environmental letter.

“The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits,” said Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga at a news conference in Rome marking the start of Caritas Internationalis, an annual meeting of Catholic charitable groups, according to The Boston Globe.


Pope Francis is expected to issue his encyclical letter on the environment this year, and Rodríguez said many within and outside of the Catholic Church are looking forward to it “with hope.” The letter also comes ahead of the United Nations’ meeting on climate change in Paris this December.

“I have already heard criticism of the encyclical,” the Honduran cardinal said, calling it “absurd” for skeptics to reject a document that has not even yet been published. The letter is expected to be released in early summer, according to reports.

The Vatican co-hosted an environmental summit with the U.N. last month, during which the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative think-tank, held another event in Rome featuring speakers challenging climate-change science.

“Though Pope Francis’s heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” said Joseph Bast, Heartland’s president, in a statement to The Guardian.