Vatican Warms to Climate Change
According to the paper, Gordon Brown, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, "is understood to have played a key role in persuading Rome to back the summit plan"; Brown proposed the conference to Vatican officials last year.
The planning for the meeting is understood to belong to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the Pontifical Academy for Sciences. As an added indicator of the Roman trend toward environmental awareness, Robert Mickens cited Pope Benedict's 2007 message for the World Day of Peace, where the pontiff said that a genuine desire for peace "must be increasingly conscious of the links between natural ecology, or respect for nature, and human ecology."
"[Benedict] said there was an 'inseperable link' between peace with creation and peace among men," Mickens wrote, "and both of these presupposed peace with God."