IT IS FITTING that the ‘The Climate Pope’ died during Earth Week, a week dedicated to Earth and the environment, a cause that became a rallying cry of his papacy in a world where many global leaders stayed silent.

Imagine a world where all our leaders spoke as clearly as Pope Francis on climate issues.

‘The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,’ he said in a major papal encyclical letter to the Church, which was dedicated to the environment and published on 18 June 2015.

‘The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes.’

‘The throwaway culture of today calls for a new lifestyle.’

Addressing the United Nations in 2015, he suggested that ‘a selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and disadvantaged.’

Two years after his appointment in 2013, Francis wrote Luadato Si’ (2015), where he set out his vision of climate change. In this landmark document, he outlined how ‘the human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together.’

Pope Francis meets teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the end of his weekly general audience in St Peter's Square at the Vatican on April 17, 2019. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

He said that environmental problems cannot be addressed in isolation but must consider the widening inequalities between the rich and poor. He suggested that an integral ecology approach is needed linking environment and climate issues to social, political and economic problems. That protecting nature must be aligned with social justice and human wellbeing.

‘What we need is a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society and our relationship with Nature,’ Francis wrote.

‘We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and one social but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.’

The release of........

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