Municipal Budget Politics Playing a Role in Catholic Church’s Sudden Conversion on the False ‘Religion’ of Global Warming?

Municipal Budget Politics Playing a Role in Catholic Church’s Sudden Conversion on the False ‘Religion’ of Global Warming? | Somewhat Reasonable:
An opinion piece in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal indicates that municipal budget politics may have something to do with the Catholic Church’s sudden acquiescence — at least in Chicago — to the Left’s global warming agenda.

In a piece entitled, The Religion of Climate Change, the paper notes that in 2011, then-Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, expressed alarm, publicly, about Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposed phase out of a water fee exemption for the church there. 
The city is, quite famously, broke, from paying generous pensions for generations of retired union workers, including teachers, police and firemen.

The new charges for water are a potential $20.3 million bill, annually, for the Church in Chicago. 

Cardinal George was quoted as saying, as late as April 2013, regarding the emerging water crisis, “If you don’t want a city that only has government institutions, then you have to see to the solvency of religious institutions and other nonprofits.”

George’s successor, Archbishop Blase Cupich on July 25, toured a Catholic school with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy. 
The archbishop invited the EPA to track the power and water usage of the archdiocese. “The Archdiocese of Chicago has partnered with the EPA’s Energy Star program, as it works to make its operations more sustainable and efficient,” the pair wrote in an op-ed piece for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Since municipal budgets around the U.S. are similarly strained — look at Detroit, for example — one reasonably wonders if church leaders there are being silently pressured into an alliance with the global Left in order to keep their parishes in the black financially. 
The WSJwarns about the serious threat to religious freedom here.

If the president can threaten, publicly, to “bankrupt” an industry like the coal business, it takes little imagination to guess what he and his allies have said to church leaders behind closed doors to “persuade” them to embrace the fringe “environmental justice” cause so quickly.