\n<\/p>\n
Pope Leo XIV has taken aim at people who \u201cridicule those who speak of global warming\u201d as he embraced Pope Francis\u2019s environmental legacy and made it his own in some of his strongest and most extensive comments on the subject to date.<\/p>\n
Leo presided over the 10th-anniversary celebration of Francis\u2019s landmark ecological encyclical, Laudato Si (Praised Be), at a global gathering south of Rome. The encyclical cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern and launched a global grassroots movement to advocate for caring for God\u2019s creation and the peoples most harmed by its exploitation.<\/p>\n
Leo told the estimated 1,000 representatives from environmental and Indigenous groups that they needed to put pressure on national governments to develop tougher standards to mitigate the damage already done. He said he hoped the upcoming UN climate conference \u201cwill listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor\u201d.<\/p>\n
He did not name names but history\u2019s first American pope spoke just days after Donald Trump complained, with false statements, to the UN general assembly about the \u201ccon job\u201d of global warming. Trump has long been a critic of climate science and polices aimed at helping to transition to green energies such as wind and solar power.<\/p>\n
Leo quoted Francis\u2019s follow-up encyclical, published in 2023, in which the Argentinian pope challenged world leaders before a UN conference to commit to binding targets to slow climate change before it was too late.<\/p>\n
Citing Francis\u2019s text, Leo recalled that some leaders had chosen to \u201cderide the evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most\u201d.<\/p>\n
He called for a change of heart to truly embrace the environmental cause and said any Christian should be onboard.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures. Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded,\u201d he said, presiding on a stage that featured a large chunk of a melting glacier from Greenland and tropical ferns.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Leo has strongly taken up Francis\u2019s ecological mantle, giving his blessing to a Vatican plan to turn an agricultural field north of Rome into a vast solar farm. Once it is up and running, the farm is expected to make Vatican City the world\u2019s first carbon-neutral state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pope Leo XIV has taken aim at people who \u201cridicule those who speak of global warming\u201d as he embraced Pope Francis\u2019s environmental legacy and made it his own in some of his strongest and most extensive comments on the subject to date. Leo presided over the 10th-anniversary celebration of Francis\u2019s landmark ecological encyclical, Laudato Si<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[9469,270,186,10311,589,15242,8283,974,8685,1167,15243],"class_list":{"0":"post-25206","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-aim","9":"tag-change","10":"tag-climate","11":"tag-cry","12":"tag-earth","13":"tag-leo","14":"tag-listen","15":"tag-pope","16":"tag-sceptics","17":"tag-takes","18":"tag-xiv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}