Week 17: Pope Francis’ Climate Activism and the Spiritual Issue of Climate Change

Dear all,

Before Pope Francis, climate change was seen primarily as either a political or a scientific issue. His encyclical reframed it as a spiritual issue. As the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, Pope Francis presented climate activism as a moral and spiritual duty for true believers, and he made climate one of the defining issues of his papacy.

Over his 12 years as head of the Catholic Church, Francis repeatedly raised concerns about human-caused global warming resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. He urged people—including world leaders—to take meaningful action.

When Argentina’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, his vision for human justice and equality was so closely linked to nature that he chose the papal name Francis, honoring the patron saint of ecology. That belief, and the passion with which he advocated for it, helped influence the direction of global climate and energy policy—most notably the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Francis’s 2015 papal letter, or encyclical, Laudato Si’ (“Praise Be to You”), was the first devoted entirely to the issue of global warming. It wove together climate science, wealth inequality, overconsumption (which he criticized as part of a “throwaway culture”), and the ethical use of technology in a 40,000-word message addressed to more than 1 billion Catholics around the world.

His words could be blunt: “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he wrote. You can read the full document here: Laudato Si’.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate something rare in the modern world: moral clarity. In a time when climate action is often reduced to spreadsheets, greenwashing, or empty pledges, Pope Francis dared to speak from a place many had forgotten—conscience. And not just any conscience. A global, spiritual one that holds sway over 1.4 billion Catholics and ripples far beyond the pews.

In Laudato Si’, his 2015 encyclical, Francis called it like it is. Buried in Chapter 1, point 54, he writes:

It is remarkable how weak international political responses have been... There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up trumping the common good.

That’s not diplomatic speak. That’s truth spoken without varnish. He goes on to describe a system hijacked by finance and tech, where genuine attempts to care for our common home are dismissed as sentimental or obstructive. For Francis, this wasn’t just a climate issue—it was a moral emergency.

And while you might think, “Well, sure, he’s the Pope,” it’s precisely because he’s the Pope that this hit differently. He wasn’t lecturing from a policy podium; he was preaching from a place of lived justice. When Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose the name “Francis,” he wasn’t just paying homage to a saint. He was aligning himself with a legacy of radical simplicity, of care for the poor and the earth—two things our economic systems often treat as disposable.

Even if you’re not religious, it’s hard to ignore how his framing of the climate crisis resonated: not just as a scientific or political problem, but as a spiritual one. He told oil executives in 2018 that switching to clean energy was a “duty to humanity”. And in Laudate Deum, his 2023 follow-up letter, he doubled down, this time with even more urgency and a stark warning:

It is chilling to realize that the capacities expanded by technology... have given those with the knowledge and especially the economic resources... an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity... It is extremely risky for a small part of humanity to have it.

Let that sink in. The Pope is not afraid to say what many only whisper—that unchecked economic and technological power has created a dangerous imbalance. And he asks us: who holds this power, and to what end?