ROME — Pope Francis said Wednesday that “Mother Earth groans and begs us to stop our abuse” of creation.
Following his weekly general audience in the Vatican, the pontiff noted September 1 will mark the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, kicking off a month-long “Season of Creation,” culminating on October 4, the feast of St Francis of Assisi.
The pope went on to express his wish that the call to listen to the voice of creation will “foster in everyone a concrete commitment to care for our common home.”
As he has done on other occasions, Francis blamed the destruction of the earth on “consumerist excesses” before proceeding to plug the upcoming United Nations climate change conference to be held from November 6 to 18, 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
He also declared that humanity is experiencing “twin crises” in the form of global warming and biodiversity loss.
Pope Francis urged Christians to care for creation Wednesday, insisting that the abuse of ecosystems is a “grave sin” while lamenting the negative effects of global warming. https://t.co/wSRGrMyt9K
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 16, 2020
“At the mercy of our consumerist excesses, our sister Mother Earth groans and begs us to stop our abuse and her destruction,” he said.
“During this Season of Creation, let us pray that the UN COP27 and COP15 summits may unite the human family in decisively addressing the twin crises of climate and biodiversity loss.”
Last month, Francis reasserted his distress over the climate change “emergency” and instructed the Holy See to sign onto the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which it subsequently did.
Humanity must combat climate change by reducing emissions as well as by “assisting and enabling people to adapt to progressively worsening changes to the climate,” he said in a written message to participants in a climate conference sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
File/Activists display banners calling for action against world poverty, climate change 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/Getty Images)
Climate change “has become an emergency that no longer remains at the margins of society,” he asserted.
“Instead, it has assumed a central place, reshaping not only industrial and agricultural systems but also adversely affecting the global human family, especially the poor and those living on the economic peripheries of our world.”
Care for our common home “is not simply a utilitarian endeavor but a moral obligation for all men and women as children of God,” he declared.
Francis went on to underscore his belief that climate change and other environmental issues constitute “severe and increasing problems” for humanity.
Pope Francis says the Chinese coronavirus global pandemic is “certainly nature’s response” to humanity’s failure to address climate change. https://t.co/gQVMxZK4yw
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 10, 2020
In his message, he refrained from mentioning the encouraging news that every year the number of global deaths from severe weather events has decreased significantly and are now a tiny fraction of what they were just 100 years ago.
Whereas a century ago, “almost half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures,” in 2020, the number dropped to just 14,000, climate expert Bjorn Lomborg noted in a Wall Street Journal essay last November.
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