The spiritual leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Roman Catholics wants globalist organizations to police environmental policies. Though Pope Francis was too ill to attend the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, he sent the Vatican’s secretary of state to tout global governance as the solution to the so-called ecological debts that wealthy nations have racked up toward poorer nations.

“I have the honor to read the address that his holiness Pope Francis prepared for this occasion,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin told 70,000 delegates assembled in Expo City, Dubai, on December 2.

“May we be attentive to the cry of the Earth, may we hear the plea of the poor, may we be sensitive to the hopes of the young and the dreams of children,” Parolin read. “It has now become clear that the climate change presently taking place stems from the overheating of the planet, caused chiefly by the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activity, which in recent decades has proved unsustainable for the ecosystem. The drive to produce and possess has become an obsession, resulting in an inordinate greed that has made the environment the object of unbridled exploitation. The climate, run amok, is crying out to us to halt this illusion of omnipotence.”

Parolin explained that Francis feels that “a world completely connected, like ours today, should not be unconnected by those who govern it.” Therefore, the world needs to “emerge from the narrowness of self-interest and nationalism” and embrace “political change” and a multilateral world.

Past climate-change agreements have been “poorly implemented, due to the lack of suitable mechanisms for oversight, periodic review, and penalties in cases of noncompliance,” France wrote. He wants leaders to adopt “mechanisms” to penalize nations that emit too much carbon dioxide.

Francis’s ideas were well received, and representatives from nearly 120 governments pledged to triple their nation’s renewable energy capacity. Yet too few are reporting on just how revolutionary Francis’s proposal is in reality. Large minorities across Europe and the United States (17 percent to 44 percent depending on the country) believe climate change is caused equally by humans and natural processes. You can reference our articles “Greenhouse Apocalypse” and “The Global Warming Scam” to see why this is the case. Yet Francis wants mechanisms to punish those who produce too much.

Fossil fuels supply 80 percent of the world’s energy, so it would take a one-world government to enforce Francis’s proposals. His speech pledges “the commitment and support of the Catholic Church” to make such change a reality. Does the pope want nations to submit to globalist bodies?

In 2014, the chairman of the pope’s Council of Cardinal Advisers delivered a lecture reaffirming that concepts of individualism and libertarianism are incompatible with Catholic social doctrine. In 1898, Pope Leo xiii condemned ideals about the separation of church and state to be heretical fallacies. So the idea that the pope favors authoritarian government shouldn’t be too surprising. As British political economist Rodney Atkinson wrote to the late Trumpet writer Ron Fraser in 2013, “Imperial politics rather than the religion of the Roman Catholic Church have been its critical characteristic.”

Jesus told Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), and the original apostles taught that true Christians should come out of the world (2 Corinthians 6:14-17; Revelation 18:4).

Many early Christians obeyed these commands out of necessity after Roman emperors prohibited all Christian worship and commanded that all churches and Christian books be destroyed. Yet ever since Emperor Constantine the Great’s Edict of Toleration in a.d. 313, many Christians have sought temporal power in addition to ecclesiastical authority. This is a well-documented fact.

Philip Van Ness Myers wrote in his landmark book Ancient History:

Long before the fall of Rome there had begun to grow up within the Roman Empire an ecclesiastical state, which in its constitution and its administrative system was shaping itself upon the imperial model. This spiritual empire, like the secular empire, possessed a hierarchy of officers, of which deacons, priests or presbyters, and bishops were the most important. The bishops collectively formed what is known as the episcopate. There were four grades of bishops, namely, country bishops, city bishops, metropolitans or archbishops, and patriarchs. At the end of the fourth century, there were five patriarchates, that is regions ruled by patriarchs. These centered in the great cities of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.

Among the patriarchs, the patriarchs of Rome were accorded almost universally a precedence in honor and dignity. They claimed further a precedence in authority and jurisdiction, and this was already widely recognized. Before the close of the eighth century there was firmly established over a great part of Christendom what we may call an ecclesiastical monarchy.

The late Herbert W. Armstrong referred to this passage from Myers’s book to demonstrate that the Roman Catholic Church is “a model, a counterpart, an image of the beast, which is the Roman Empire government.” Therefore, just as the Catholic Church relied on temporal powers to enforce its edicts about the trinity, Sunday worship and original sin, we should expect the Catholic Church to continue reaching out to temporal powers to enforce its edicts on economics, climate change and foreign policy.

Francis has strong opinions about the insulating effects of carbon dioxide, yet his recent speech was not really about the environment. It was about getting world leaders to pay homage to Rome!

To learn more about what Bible prophecy reveals about world events now leading to the end of this age, request a free copy of Who or What Is the Prophetic Beast?, by Herbert W. Armstrong.