People of faith cannot love God while despising his creatures, and people cannot call themselves Christians without caring for everything fragile and wounded, including the earth, Pope Leo XIV told climate activists and political and religious leaders yesterday. Source: CNS.
“There is no room for indifference or resignation,” he said, inaugurating an international conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home.
Seated behind a slowly melting chunk of ice from a glacier in Greenland, the Pope said, “God will ask us if we have cultivated and cared for the world that he created, for the benefit of all and for future generations, and if we have taken care of our brothers and sisters.”
“What will be our answer?” he asked.
Pope Leo spoke during the opening session of a three-day conference titled, “Raising Hope for Climate Justice”.
Organised by the Laudato Si’ Movement and with the support of the Vatican dicasteries for Promoting Integral Human Development and Communication, the event was held at the Focolare Movement’s Mariapoli Centre near the papal summer villa in Castel Gandolfo.
The conference brought together about 500 delegates representing global leaders, faith-based organisations, governments, and NGOs active in climate justice to celebrate the achievements since Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical was published in 2015, and to develop new strategies for expanded partnerships and concrete action.
“We are one family, with one Father,” Pope Leo said, and “we inhabit the same planet and must care for it together.
“I, therefore, renew my strong appeal for unity around integral ecology and for peace!
“The challenges identified in Laudato Si’ are in fact even more relevant today than they were 10 years ago,” the Pope said, and these challenges, which are social, political and spiritual, “call for conversion”.
“It is only by returning to the heart that a true ecological conversion can take place,” Pope Leo said. “We must shift from collecting data to caring; and from environmental discourse to an ecological conversion that transforms both personal and communal lifestyles.”
For believers, he said, “we cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures. Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded.”
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World must come together to fight climate change, Pope Leo says (By Carol Glatz, CNS via Catholic Review)
