VATICAN CITY (AP) — There's something of a whodunit going on in the Vatican to discover who leaked Pope Francis' environment encyclical to an Italian newsweekly, deflating the release of the most anticipated and feared papal document in recent times. 
 
 Pope Francis delivers his message on the occasion of an audience with participants of Rome's diocese convention in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, June 14, 2015. Francis engaged in some self-promotion... (Associated Press) 
 
 L'Espresso magazine published the full 191 pages of "Laudato Si" (Be Praised) on its website Monday, three days before the official launch. The Vatican said it was just a draft, but most media ran with it, given that it covered many of the same points Francis and his advisers have been making in the run-up to the release. 
 
 On Tuesday, the Vatican indefinitely suspended the press credentials of L'Espresso's veteran Vatican correspondent, Sandro Magister, saying the publication had been "incorrect." 
 
 Magister told The Associated Press that his editor, not he, obtained the document and decided to publish it. 
 
 "I just wrote the introduction," Magister said in a text message, adding that he had promised the Vatican to keep quiet about the scoop. 
 
 In the draft of the encyclical, Francis says global warming is "mostly" due to human activity and the burning of fossil fuels. He calls for a radical change in behavior to save the planet for future generations and prevent the poor from suffering the worst effects of industry-induced environmental degradation. 
 
 Several Vatican commentators hypothesized that the leak was aimed at taking the punch out of Thursday's official launch of the encyclical, in which the Vatican has lined up a Catholic cardinal, an Orthodox theologian, an atheist scientist and an economist to discuss the contents. 
 
 They noted that conservatives — particularly in the U.S. — attacked the encyclical even before it was released, chiding the pope for talking science in a church document and insisting that global warming isn't a scientific reality. It would be in their interest, the argument goes, to fudge the pope's message. 
 
 Italian daily La Stampa suggested that the leak might have come from "conservatives" inside Vatican, noting that Francis' reform plans for the Vatican bureaucracy have been resisted by the more conservative old guard who would have an interest in sabotaging Francis' labor of love. 
 
 A leak, however, was to be expected, given that drafts of the document have been circulating for months and that the text had been translated into multiple languages before its official release. 
 
 Not to mention that the Vatican has had a long and storied history of leaked documents: The last big scandal in 2012 resulted in the pope's butler being put on trial for stealing his private papers and passing them off to an Italian journalist. He was convicted but was eventually pardoned by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI. 
 
 In the aftermath of the "Vatileaks" scandal, the Vatican City State updated its criminal code to include severe penalties for anyone who leaks a Vatican document or publishes news from it: Up to two years in prison and a 5,000 euro ($5,600) fine. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield ||||| Conservative distrust of Pope Francis, which has been building in the U.S. throughout his pontificate, is reaching a boiling point over his plan to urge action on climate change — and to do so through a document traditionally used for the most important papal teachings. 
 
 For months, Francis has been drafting an encyclical on the environment and global warming which he hopes to release by June or July. Encyclicals are written with the help of a small group of advisers working under strict secrecy. But in a news conference as he traveled last week to the Philippines, Francis gave his strongest signal yet of the direction he'll take. 
 
 He said global warming was "mostly" man-made. And he said he wanted his encyclical out in plenty of time to be absorbed before the next round of U.N. climate change talks in Paris in November after the last round in Lima, Peru, failed to reach an agreement. 
 
 "I don't know if it (human activity) is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face," Francis said. "We have in a sense taken over nature." 
 
 Even before these remarks, several conservative U.S. commentators had been pre-emptively attacking the encyclical. At Investor's Business Daily, Forbes and TownHall.com, writers had accused the pope of adopting a radical environmental agenda. 
 
 "Pope Francis — and I say this as a Catholic — is a complete disaster when it comes to his public policy pronouncements," wrote Steve Moore, chief economist of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "On the economy, and even more so on the environment, the pope has allied himself with the far left and has embraced an ideology that would make people poorer and less free." 
 
 At the website of the Catholic journal First Things, a blogger accused the pope of promoting "theologized propaganda" on conservation — a post the journal's editor later disavowed — and published guidance by prominent Catholic thinker Robert George about what should be considered authoritative in an encyclical and what could be ignored. 
 
 "For the most part, they are conservatives who have criticized other Catholics in the past for disagreeing with definitive statements in papal encyclicals." said David Cloutier, a theologian at Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland who specializes in the environment. "They're scared that the document is going to say something definitive that they can't agree with. That will put them in a very difficult situation." 
 
 While Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI took strong stands in favor of environmental protection, Francis will be the first to address climate change in such a significant way. He will be doing so following a series of sermons, interviews and writings that have unsettled American conservatives accustomed to hearing many of their priorities — on abortion and marriage especially — echoed loudly from Rome. 
 
 Francis' strong and frequent denunciations of the global financial system and trickle-down economic theories prompted radio host Rush Limbaugh to call the pope's economic views "pure Marxism." The pontiff has said he is simply quoting church teaching on helping the poor. 
 
 After Francis helped normalize U.S. relations with Cuba, Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American and Florida Republican who opposed detente, said he would "ask His Holiness to take up the cause of freedom and democracy." 
 
 By tackling climate change, Francis is marching through yet another U.S. partisan minefield and taking a position abhorrent to many Republicans. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to consider climate-change real and largely man-made. While about a quarter of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents agree, the rest blame natural patterns, say not enough is known or insist warming is not occurring at all, according to the Pew Research Center. In the new GOP-controlled Senate, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, who has called global warming a "hoax," has been chosen by fellow Republicans as head of the Environment and Public Works Committee. 
 
 "What they're worried about is the solution," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. "Climate change is the ultimate collective-action problem. It's going to require local, state and national policy change, and it's going to require international cooperation, which means the United Nations." 
 
 Those on all sides of the debate will be watching for how far the pope will delve into the science around climate change in the body of the encyclical. In a news conference last August, Francis said that since the document is "doctrinal and needs to be certain," less-certain scientific theories could be mentioned in footnotes. But the pope did not offer any examples. 
 
 The Rev. James Bretzke, a moral theologian at Boston College, predicts the document will address larger spiritual and moral themes, such as care for God's creation and the poor who are most affected by climate change, along with calls for global cooperation to address the problem. 
 
 "The fact of climate change will be accepted and underscored," Bretzke said. "I think it would be a safe bet to suggest that the encyclical will be fairly concrete and specific and that there will likely be some specific ethical calls for action that will cause a certain amount of discomfort to a broad range of various populations — from First World manufacturers to emerging Third World economies such as China." 
 
 Francis is due to speak at the United Nations in New York in September where he may press the assembly on global warming before climate change talks begin. He has already urged negotiators to be "courageous."
– The "heinous act" of leaking the draft of Pope Francis' long-awaited environment encyclical may have been designed to steal some thunder from Thursday's official launch, Vatican observers say—and some think it may have been masterminded by Vatican insiders, the AP reports. What the news agency is calling "something of a whodunit" is transpiring inside the Holy See after Italian mag L'Espresso published a 190-page-plus draft of the pontiff's "Laudato Si" ("Be Praised") letter on its website yesterday, confirmed by the Vatican to be a draft of the real deal. Today the Vatican called the posting of the draft "incorrect" and suspended the press credentials of Sandro Magister, the magazine's longtime Vatican reporter and "most reliable and revered vaticanisti," per his own Chiesa website. However, Magister claims he's not the one who obtained or leaked the document—his editor is, he tells the AP. "I just wrote the introduction," he texted, confirming that he had promised the Vatican his lips were sealed about the encyclical, which features Francis hitting global warming as being predominantly caused by humans and our insistence on burning fossil fuels. Who is under the microscope, according to some observers: Vatican conservatives who wanted the pope to keep his nose out of science and stick to church doctrine. The AP cites La Stampa, an Italian daily, as saying that those old-school conservatives don't appreciate the pope's attempts at reform. Some commentators say the leak may have been planned to devalue Thursday's launch, which will be assisted by decidedly non-church-affiliated professionals, including an atheist scientist and an economist, per the AP. (This isn't the first ugly Vatican leak.)