Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was simply elected as the brand new chief of the Catholic Church, appears to have related views on the surroundings as his predecessor, Pope Francis. Prevost, who’s taking the identify Pope Leo XIV, has been outspoken concerning the want for pressing local weather motion and voiced his help for the usage of local weather know-how reminiscent of photo voltaic panels and EVs.
Pope Francis, who died in April, made the local weather disaster a central issue of his papacy. He urged fossil fuel executives to transition to scrub power, calling the rising greenhouse fuel ranges “disturbing and a trigger for actual concern”; he declared a global climate emergency; and he launched a project to energy the Vatican with photo voltaic panels, amongst different acts.
Now Pope Leo XIV appears poised to comply with in Francis’s environmental footsteps. When Francis spoke, in November 2024, about how local weather change would impression the world’s most susceptible populations, and the way it requires world cooperation to deal with, Cardinal Prevost shared his help for local weather motion, too. Prevost “careworn it’s time to transfer ‘from phrases to motion,’ ” on the local weather, Vatican News reported on the time.
Prevost additionally warned in opposition to the “consequences of unchecked technological development,” whereas reiterating the church’s dedication to defending the surroundings via actions just like the Vatican’s photo voltaic panels or by shifting to electrical automobiles.
In Catholicism, there’s the idea that God has given people “dominion over nature,” a directive that has been interpreted by some as domination over the planet and its creatures. Pope Francis, nevertheless, championed an interpretation that advocated much less for exploitation and extra for concord with nature, and the need to take care of it. Cardinal Prevost has echoed this concept, saying, per Vatican News, that dominion over nature shouldn’t develop into “tyrannical,” however as a substitute have to be a “ ‘relationship of reciprocity’ with the surroundings.”
Prevost hasn’t been vocal about his positions broadly, so it’s not precisely clear what environmental actions he’ll take throughout his papacy. However his bio on the College of Cardinals Report, an internet site run by Catholic journalists, notes that he “is reportedly very near Francis’s imaginative and prescient relating to the surroundings, outreach to the poor and migrants, and assembly individuals the place they’re.”
Add comment