“If you want to cultivate peace, care for creation,” Pope Leo XIV told global leaders attending the United Nations Climate Conference in Brazil. Source: OSV News.
As the international community focuses on resolving war and conflict, countries must recognise that “peace is also threatened” by climate change and environmental destruction, the Pope said in a message to the Leaders Summit of COP30 in Belem.
Threats to peace are heightened “by a lack of due respect for creation, by the plundering of natural resources and by a progressive decline in the quality of life because of climate change,” said the message, read to the assembly on Friday, November 7 by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State and head of the Vatican delegation to COP30.
Pope Leo quoted Pope Benedict XVI’s message for World Peace Day 2010: “The quest for peace by people of goodwill surely would become easier if all acknowledge the indivisible relationship between God, human beings and the whole of creation.”
Climate change, pollution and the destruction that follows the thoughtless exploitation of natural resources have a global impact, Pope Leo said, and they “endanger the lives of everyone on this planet”.
Pope Leo also quoted St John Paul II’s message for World Peace Day 1990, which said that “the ecological crisis ‘is a moral issue’ and, as such, it ‘reveals the urgent moral need for a new solidarity, especially in relations among the developing nations and those that are highly industrialised’.”
“Tragically,” Pope Leo said, “those in the most vulnerable situations are the first to suffer the devastating effects of climate change, deforestation and pollution. Caring for creation, therefore, becomes an expression of humanity and solidarity.”
The pope asked the global leaders gathered in Brazil to work together to achieve a concrete plan that puts “the sacredness of life, the God-given dignity of every human being and the common good at its centre.”
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Caring for creation is part of peacemaking, pope tells COP30 (By Cindy Wooden, OSV News)
