ROME, Italy — Pope Francis warned Thursday that the climate crisis has become so acute it now threatens “life itself” on earth.
“I think we are all aware of this: the harm we are causing to the planet is no longer limited to damage to the climate, water, and soil, but now threatens life itself on earth,” the pope told an academic convocation at Rome’s Lateran University.
The pontiff cited a scientist who asserted his newborn granddaughter “will live in an uninhabitable world if we don’t change things.”
An unwillingness to change because “it has always been done this way” is “suicidal,” Francis said.
In this dramatic context, the university is called “to form ecological awareness” as well as promoting “integral ecological conversion to preserve the splendor of nature,” he stated.
(From L) Ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, Pope Francis and the Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay take part in the inauguration of a UNESCO chair at the Pontifical Lateran University on October 7, 2021 in Rome. (Photo by FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images)
The university is “the custodian of an imperative that has no religious, ideological, or cultural borders: to guard our common home, to defend it from wicked actions, perhaps inspired by immediate result-based politics, economics, and education, for the benefit of a few.”
On Monday, Francis warned humanity is inflicting “serious wounds” on the environment in a message in preparation for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) to be held in Glasgow.
These serious wounds on the environment include “climate change, desertification, pollution and loss of biodiversity,” the pontiff said
The only way to counteract climate change and other ecological ills is by “an urgently needed change of direction, nurtured also by our respective religious beliefs and spirituality,” the pope said. “We cannot act alone, for each of us is fundamentally responsible to care for others and for the environment.”
Francis pledged his unconditional support for the U.N. climate change program, underscoring his conviction that the world is undergoing an “unprecedented ecological crisis.”
“COP26 in Glasgow represents an urgent summons to provide effective responses to the unprecedented ecological crisis and the crisis of values that we are presently experiencing, and in this way to offer concrete hope to future generations,” he said. “We want to accompany it with our commitment and our spiritual closeness.”
Earlier this year, he reiterated his conviction that the earth is suffering the worst environmental crisis of its history.
For a long time, the earth “has suffered from the wounds that we cause due to a predatory attitude, which makes us feel like owners of the planet and its resources and authorizes us to irresponsibly use the goods that God has given us,” he said in a video message last May.
“Today, these wounds are dramatically manifested in an unprecedented ecological crisis that affects the soil, air, water and, in general, the ecosystem in which human beings live,” he said.
Pope Francis has been a vocal critic of alarmism, insisting that making political decisions based on fear is misguided because fear “weakens and destabilizes us, destroys our psychological and spiritual defenses, and numbs us to the suffering of others.”
“No tyranny can be sustained without exploiting our fears,” he said in 2016.
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