- The world has never before seen a pope like Francis, who died this week at the Vatican in Rome. He spoke with uncompromising conviction for all of nature, the poor, Indigenous and traditional peoples, and for all those who lack a voice in the halls of corporate and political power.
- His spiritual writings on climate change are unprecedented. From 2015 onward, he spoke out in official papal documents in defense of all living beings — recognizing the importance of preserving the complex web of life, melding science and faith, and urging humanity to embrace an iron-willed resolve to conserve “our common home.”
- His lofty words directly inspired the preamble of the landmark 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and helped launch conservation advocacy alliances between people of all faiths. But Francis met with great opposition and was often minimized or ignored by many in the Catholic Church, by the business community and global leaders.
- Mongabay contributor Justin Catanoso has reported on the pope’s progress as conservationist and humanist over the last decade. Here he offers a sampling of the pontiff’s words urgently imploring all of us, but especially consumers, the business community and world leaders, to live into our sacred duty as Earth stewards.
Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, was as much a tireless advocate for nature as he was the poor and marginalized the world over. While his death leaves a vacuum of moral environmental leadership within the globe’s largest religion, the words of Francis still echo through tropical rainforests and grasslands, across rivers and oceans.
The pope, who died April 21 in Rome at age 88, never attended a United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. But in this astute observation in Laudato Si’, the pioneering Catholic teaching document released in the summer of 2015 in defense of the natural world, Francis eloquently voices the biennial meeting’s defining spirit:
“It is not enough … to think of different species merely as potential ‘resources’ to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves. Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost forever,” Francis wrote with both biological accuracy and spiritual authority.
“The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.”
When it was released, the uncompromising message of Laudato Si’ reverberated round the world and it is reflected throughout the preamble of the historic Paris Agreement on climate change of 2015. Its essence also reverberates in the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework with its sweeping recognition that the preservation in full of the interconnectedness of all nature is our best way forward to healing a suffering planet.
“It may well disturb us to learn of the extinction of mammals and birds, since they are more visible,” Francis wrote. “But the good functioning of ecosystems also requires fungi, algae, worms, insects, reptiles and an innumerable variety of microorganisms.”
Francis had neither patience nor time for climate skeptics or doubters of scientific fact who refused to acknowledge their own actions as a root cause of nature’s decline and the climate system’s destabilization:
“A sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly.”
What was true 10 years ago when Francis espoused these views is more emphatically and urgently true today.
But among all the most influential world leaders, Francis stood alone in his unflinching determination to defend “God’s creation,” especially the Amazon and Indigenous peoples everywhere. He uncompromisingly decried the relentless prioritization of capitalism over environmental protection and excoriated policymakers for their failure to adequately address the worsening climate crisis in one failed U.N. summit after another.
“International negotiations cannot make significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their national interests above the global common good,” Francis wrote in Laudate Deum, his forceful, often angry, 2023 sequel to Laudato Si’. “Those who will have to suffer the consequences of what we are trying to hide will not forget this failure of conscience and responsibility.”
Consumerism and capitalism under fire
Francis’ blunt, clear-eyed criticism of consumerism and capitalism struck at the very heart of the drivers of a booming global economy: Deforest, extract, produce, buy, throw away, repeat, repeat, repeat. In Laudato Si’, he wrote:
“Each year hundreds of millions of tons of waste are generated, much of it non-biodegradable, highly toxic and radioactive, from homes and businesses, from construction and demolition sites, from clinical, electronic and industrial sources. The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”
In putting corporate leaders in the crosshairs of his criticism, he enflamed critics in his own church and was routinely dismissed by powerful business interests as naive or misguided.
One such critical response to Laudato Si’, offered to me in a 2015 interview by Roque Benavides, chairman of the Buenaventura Mining Company (Peru’s largest publicly traded precious metals firm), is typical of the business community’s criticisms:
“The pope keeps saying we need to avoid economic development. But you don’t stop economic development because of environmental issues. The fact is, we all have to worry about environmental issues, but we also have to worry about economic development. There has to be a balance.”
Francis, however, denied that this imagined balance exists. The pope’s words attest that the mess our world is in today has largely occurred because capitalists all too rarely prioritize nature over profits.
The pope also didn’t spare those of us who benefit from the flood of cheap goods flowing from desecrated ecosystems. Consumerism “has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology,” he wrote. “It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.”
Defending the Amazon and its people
The pope’s love of nature extended to the largest remaining tropical forest on Earth: the Amazon and the Indigenous tribes that have learned to live in harmony with their natural surroundings, which teem with a Noah’s Ark of biodiversity.
In 2020, he released the 94-page “Querida Amazonia” (Dear Amazon), an extraordinary plea for the world to join together to save the vast rainforest stretching across much of his native South America.
In keeping with the pope’s sense of global leadership, Dear Amazon wasn’t only addressed to Catholics, but “to all persons of good will.” It summarized the findings of a three-week Vatican synod, a formal meeting held in late 2019, the likes of which the Vatican had never seen before, bringing together hundreds of Catholic bishops, Indigenous leaders and environmental activists from nine South American countries with territory in the Amazon.
Francis’ post-synod response in defense of the rainforest was at once scientific, humanistic, political and spiritual — a hallmark of all his environmental teachings.
“If the care of people and the care of ecosystems are inseparable, this becomes especially important in places where ‘the forest is not a resource to be exploited; it is a being, or various beings, with which we have to relate,’” Francis wrote. “When the indigenous peoples ‘remain on their land, they themselves care for it best,’ provided that they do not let themselves be taken in by the siren songs and the self-serving proposals of power groups.”
Two years prior, making his first trip to the Peruvian Amazon, Francis declared to the throngs that gathered in a region ravaged by deforestation, illegal gold mining and fossil fuel extraction, “The Native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present.”
In partial response to Pope Francis’ tropical forest advocacy, the U.N. Environment Programme, in partnership with an array of faith-based eco-groups, founded the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative. That diverse group continues operating in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia, lobbying local governments for environmental protection and Indigenous rights and organizing grassroots climate action.
Still, the pope was not without his critics within Indigenous communities. Some believed his apologies on behalf of the Catholic Church did not go far enough for its historical abuses of Indigenous groups around the world. Others were disappointed in his 2015 canonization of Junípero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan friar who helped bring Catholicism to California but was also seen as a brutal colonizer of Native Americans.
Impatience with policymakers
In October 2023, eight years after the release of Laudato Si’, a clearly impatient and sometimes outraged pope released the sequel Laudate Deum. In it, he fairly shouted that climate change is accelerating while the goal of the Paris Agreement — holding global temperature rise to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above a 1900 baseline — was rapidly slipping beyond reach.
He wrote: “With the passage of time, I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”
Once again, the pope accurately delineated basic climate science and sought to dispel misconceptions and denials around climate realities “even within the Catholic Church.”
But Francis reserved his harshest criticisms for global policymakers as he reviewed the feeble national ambitions and broken promises that flowed out of every annual U.N. climate summit since Paris in 2015.
“We must move beyond the mentality of appearing to be concerned but not having the courage needed to produce substantial changes,” he wrote. “Once and for all, let us put an end to the irresponsible derision that would present this issue as something purely ecological, ‘green,’ romantic, frequently subject to ridicule by economic interests.”
A singular leader, a lasting legacy
It is fair to ask just what has been accomplished by the flood of bold exhortations on environmental protection and climate change during Pope Francis’ 12-year pontificate.
Business leaders have largely turned a deaf ear to his critiques. Policymakers, knowing full well the likely dire consequences, continue to fall short on the will and financial outlay needed to slow global warming. Conservative Catholics turned against him.
Francis saw this during his time as pope. But it diminished neither his faith in mankind nor his hope for change. On analysis, it is hard to point to another major modern international leader who has expressed such ceaseless, steadfast conviction in defending and fighting for “our common home.” His example continues to inspire environmental activism inside and outside churches, mosques, temples and within Indigenous spiritual traditions.
This singular leadership will surely be a lasting part of his legacy, as his words continue spreading like soft ripples across the Earth he loved.
“There is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face,” Francis wrote. “The world sings of an infinite Love: how can we fail to care for it?”
Banner image: Pope Francis, 1936-2025. Image by Martin Schulz, former EP president via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Justin Catanoso, a regular contributor, has covered the intersection of faith and environmental protection for Mongabay since the 2015 release of Laudato Si’.
Pope Francis condemns world leaders for deeply flawed UN climate process
Citation:
McCallum, M. L. (2019). Perspective: Global country-by-country response of public interest in the environment to the papal encyclical, Laudato SI′. Biological Conservation, 235, 209-225. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2019.04.010
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