Few moments in Pope Francis’ papacy higher exemplify his understanding of climate change and the necessity to handle it than the rain-soaked Mass he celebrated in Tacloban, Philippines, in 2015.
Wearing one among the low-cost plastic yellow ponchos that were handed out to the faithful, Francis experienced first-hand the kind of freak, extreme storms that scientists blame on global warming and are increasingly striking vulnerable, low-lying islands.
He had traveled to Tacloban, on the island of Leyte, to comfort survivors of one among the strongest recorded tropical cyclones, Typhoon Haiyan. The 2013 storm killed greater than 7,300 people, flattened villages and displaced about 5 million residents.
But with one other storm approaching Tacloban two years later, Francis needed to cut short his visit to get off the island.
“So a lot of you’ve lost the whole lot. I don’t know what to let you know,” Francis told the group in Tacloban’s muddy airport field because the wind nearly toppled candlesticks on the altar.
Francis, who died Monday at 88, was moved to silence that day by the survivors’ pain and the devastation he saw. But he would channel it just a few months later when he published his landmark encyclical, “Praised Be,” which solid take care of the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern.
The first ecological encyclical
The document, written to encourage global negotiators on the 2015 Paris climate talks, accused the “structurally perverse,” profit-driven economy of the worldwide north of ravaging Earth and turning it right into a “pile of filth.” The poor, Indigenous peoples and islanders like those in Tacloban suffered essentially the most, he argued, bearing the brunt of accelerating droughts, extreme storms, deforestation and pollution.
It was the primary ecological encyclical, and it affirmed the Argentine Jesuit, who in his youth studied to be a chemist, as an authoritative voice within the environmental movement. Later cited by presidents and scientists, the document inspired a world faith-based coalition to try to save lots of God’s creation before it was too late.
“I believe he understood from the start that there are three relationships that needed to be regenerated: Our relationship with God, our relationship with the created world and our relationship with our fellow creatures,” said papal biographer Austen Ivereigh.
It wasn’t at all times so.
A conversion in 2007 in Brazil
Francis had a steep learning curve on the environment, just as he did with clergy sexual abuse, which he initially dismissed as overblown. He himself pointed to a 2007 meeting of Latin American and Caribbean bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, because the moment of his ecological awakening.
There, the then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been elected to draft the conference’s final document, and was under pressure to incorporate calls from Brazilian bishops to spotlight the plight of the Amazon.
Bergoglio, the dour-faced archbishop of urbane Buenos Aires, didn’t get what all of the fuss was about.
“At first I used to be a bit annoyed,” Francis wrote within the 2020 book “Let Us Dream.” “It struck me as excessive.”
By the top of the meeting, Bergoglio was converted and convinced.
The final Aparecida document devoted several sections to the environment: It denounced multinational extraction firms that plundered the region’s resources on the expense of the poor. It warned of melting glaciers and the consequences of lost biodiversity. It solid the ravaging of the planet as an assault on God’s divine plan that violated the biblical imperative to “cultivate and care” for creation.
Those same issues would later find prominence in “Praised Be,” which took its name from the repeated first line of the “Canticle of the Creatures,” one among the best-known poetic songs of the pontiff’s nature-loving namesake, St. Francis of Assisi.
They also can be highlighted within the Amazon Synod that Francis called on the Vatican in 2019, a gathering of bishops and Indigenous peoples specifically to handle how the Catholic Church could and may reply to the plight of the Amazon and its impoverished people.
“I believe the pope’s most significant contribution was to insist on the moral aspect of the talk about climate justice,” said Giuseppe Onofrio, head of Greenpeace Italy, “that the poor were those that contributed the least to pollution and the climate crisis, but were paying the best price.”
How the environment affects all other ills
In some ways, those self same issues would also come to define much of Francis’ papacy. He got here to view the environmental cause as encapsulating nearly all the opposite ills afflicting humanity within the twenty first century: poverty, social and economic injustice, migration and what he called the “throwaway culture” — a melting pot of problems that he was convinced could only be addressed holistically.
Some of Francis’ strongest calls to guard the environment would come on or around Earth Day, celebrated April 22.
“For a while now, we’ve been becoming more aware that nature deserves to be protected, even when only because human interaction with God’s biodiversity must take care with utmost care and respect,” Francis said in a video message released on Earth Day in 2021.
Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian Jesuit whom Francis would later entrust with the ecological dossier, said the 2007 meeting in Brazil had a big effect on Francis.
“In Aparecida, listening to so many various bishops talking about what was deteriorating, but in addition what the people were suffering, I believe really impressed him,” said Czerny.
Czerny’s mandate encapsulated Francis’ vision of “integral ecology,” covering the environment, the Vatican’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its charitable Caritas federation, migration advocacy, economic development and its antinuclear campaign.
The multifaceted approach was intentional, Czerny said, to determine recent fascinated about ecology that went beyond the politicized concept of “green” advocacy to something greater and nonnegotiable: humanity’s relationship with God and creation.
“Everything is connected,” Francis liked to say.
A legacy from Pope Paul VI
He was in no way the primary pope to embrace the ecological cause. According to the book “The Popes and Ecology,” Pope Paul VI was the primary pontiff to check with an “ecological catastrophe” in a 1970 speech to a U.N. food agency.
St. John Paul II largely ignored the environment, though he did write the primary truly ecological manifesto: his 1990 World Day of Peace message, which linked consumer lifestyle with environmental decay.
Pope Benedict XVI was generally known as the “green pope,” primarily for having installed solar panels on the Vatican auditorium and starting a tree-planting campaign to offset the greenhouse gas emissions of Vatican City.
Francis issued an update to “Praised Be” in 2023, just before the U.N. climate conference in Dubai. While consistent with the unique text, the update was much more dire and showed Francis had grown more urgent in his alarm.
He became much more willing to point fingers on the world’s biggest emitters of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, especially the U.S. And he called out those, including within the church, who denied the human causes of world warming.
“He showed that he had an understanding of what was happening on the planet, and he saw the world from the standpoint, as he was prefer to say, of the peripheries, of the margins,” said Ivereigh, the papal biographer. “He brought the margins into the middle.”
