ROME — Vatican representatives stoked fears of a climate emergency Thursday, insisting global warming is “bringing humanity to its knees.”
In a Vatican press conference to present Pope Francis’ message for the World Day of Care for Creation, Father Alberto Ravagnani said that the climate crisis is a “dramatic provocation to our humanity” because when creation suffers, we all suffer.
“The climate crisis is bringing the whole of humanity to its knees,” he declared.
The environmental question “is particularly close to the hearts of today’s young people, because the current climate crisis looms over their future and that of their children as an increasingly inescapable threat,” the priest warned.
Ecological issues are rightly included in youth ministry for the formation of the faith of the new generations, he said, because faith “kindles hope and mobilizes action, so as to generate new works for the good of the environment.”
For us Christians, the environmental theme is “essential,” he asserted, because it has to do with our identity as creatures. This theme of faith “will be a point of contact between the Church and society, between believers and non-believers, from which to join forces and walk together with all men and women of good will towards a better world,” he said.
Activists display banners calling for action against world poverty, climate chanege and other environmental issues as they arrive on St. Peter’s square prior to Pope Francis’s Sunday Angelus prayer on June 28, 2015 at the Vatican. ( GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP via Getty Images)
Because of their online activity, young people share their ecological dreams, he suggested, noting that the internet is “very sensitive to environmental issues and it is precisely through social media that environmental movements have started and developed and are already promoting a new ecological culture.”
In a similar vein, Sister Alessandra Smerilli warned those present of a “worsening climate crisis” giving rise to an “urgent call to conversion,” which calls for a reversal of humanity’s course.
“What is most concrete, visible, earthly – what the air, the water, the earth and the poor cry out to us in their suffering – is intimately connected to a revolution of the spirit,” Sister Smerilli stated. “It is this event that breaks the causal chains that seem to predetermine the fate of the world.”
Already in the New Testament a radical sense of communion with all creatures makes the “cry of the earth and of the living” heard, she said, voicing “a need for salvation and redemption that today has only become infinitely more acute, through the responsibility of human beings.”
Another speaker at the Vatican event, María Lía Zervino, took the occasion to praise the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, “which has been supported by many religious leaders and nations vulnerable to the climate crisis.”
“Our hope allows us to see what is now invisible, a world free from the fossil fuel monopoly,” she insisted.
“Hope alone is not enough,” she continued, because what is needed is “a conversion of lifestyles.”