The Vatican released Pope Francis’s long-awaited encyclical yesterday.

Its take on global warming represents Rome’s greatest scientific blunder since Galileo was tried in 1633 “for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world.”

CFACT’s Marc Morano has been covering the details of this story as they break. He has already been quoted by a number of leading news outlets, including The New York Times, UK Guardian, Washington Times, UK Daily Mail, and Los Angeles Times, among others. You can watch his interview from earlier this week on FOX Business Network’s “Varney & Co.” here.

Be sure to check out ClimateDepot.com to keep abreast of developments.

In April, Marc joined a delegation of climate skeptics at a Morano at vaticanglobal warming conference in Rome. As we reported at the time, the questions and hard facts they raised truly stole the warming campaign’s thunder.

Marc had this to say about the Pope’s encyclical after its release: “The papal encyclical, no matter how nuanced it may read, will simply be used as a tool to support UN global warming ‘solutions’ that are at odds with most Catholic teachings on issues such as abortion, contraception, overpopulation, and helping the poor nations develop. The Vatican appears to be taking an unprecedented step by seemingly endorsing a specific UN climate treaty.”

Amazingly, the Vatican’s refusal to consider the mountains of scientific data that challenge the UN’s dogma on climate makes the comparison with Galileo’s trial remarkably apt. Books were burned and consideration of the heliocentric theory of the solar system banned. Today, for global warming pressure groups, censorship is a first resort.

Frustrated by the Churcgalileoh’s deliberate blindness to the facts revealed by telescopes about astronomy, Galileo wrote to Johannes Kepler, “what do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.”

Is it modern-day heresy to point out that the UN’s climate computer models project a warmer world than satellite observations record? That these satellites can find no meaningful global warming since the 1990’s? That the weather is historically normal and the incredibly painful and expensive “solutions” the UN prescribes would have very little impact on the climate, even if the UN’s models were correct?

In advocating for a UN global warming treaty, the Vatican has aligned the Church with radical secular leftists who despise traditional Catholic values and teachings. Indeed, yesterday’s Los Angeles Times quoted Morano as saying, “The irony is that the people who are lauding the pope’s position on climate disagree with just about everything else he stands for.”

A Pew research study reports that only 47 percent of U.S. Catholics believe that human activity is the main cause of the slight warming that occurred last century. If the Vatican veers off the path of sound science and continues down the global warming campaign’s slippery propaganda slope it risks alienating educated Catholics everywhere.

This is a sad development. Those in the Vatican need to reassess the facts.

We’ll keep on presenting the facts in the hope that they do.

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 Marc Morano on Varney & Co.