October 3, 2025 // National

World Must Unite to Fight Climate Change, Pope Says

Carol Glatz

Catholic News Service

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy (CNS) – People of faith cannot love God while despising His creatures, and people cannot call themselves Christians without caring for everything fragile and wounded, including the earth, Pope Leo XIV told climate activists and political and religious leaders.

“There is no room for indifference or resignation,” he said while inaugurating an international conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.

Seated behind a slowly melting chunk of ice from a glacier in Greenland, the pope said, “God will ask us if we have cultivated and cared for the world that He created, for the benefit of all and for future generations, and if we have taken care of our brothers and sisters.”

“What will be our answer?” he asked.

Pope Leo spoke on Wednesday, October 1, during the beginning session of a three-day conference titled, “Raising Hope for Climate Justice.” Organized by the Laudato Si’ Movement and with the support of the Vatican dicasteries for Promoting Integral Human Development and Communication, the event was held at the Focolare Movement’s Mariapoli Center near the papal summer villa in Castel Gandolfo.

The conference brought together approximately 500 delegates representing global leaders, faith-based organizations, governments, and NGOs active in climate justice in order to celebrate what has been achieved since Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical was published in 2015 and to hammer out new strategies for expanded partnerships and concrete action.

“We are one family, with one Father,” Pope Leo said, and “we inhabit the same planet and must care for it together.”

“I, therefore, renew my strong appeal for unity around integral ecology and for peace!” he said.

Pope Leo noted, as Pope Francis did in his follow-up exhortation, Laudate Deum, that “some have chosen to deride the increasingly 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 the most.”

“What must be done now to ensure that caring for our common home and listening to the cry of the earth and the poor do not appear as mere passing trends or, worse still, are seen and felt as divisive issues?” he asked.

“Everyone in society, through nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups, must put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures, and controls,” the pope said.

“Citizens need to take an active role in political decision-making at national, regional, and local levels,” he said. “Only then will it be possible to mitigate the damage done to the environment.”

Pope Leo asked the audience to “give thanks to our Father in heaven for this gift we have inherited from Pope Francis!” which was followed by enthusiastic applause.

“The challenges identified in Laudato Si’ are in fact even more relevant today than they were 10 years ago,” he said, and these challenges, which are social, political, and spiritual, “call for conversion.”

“It is only by returning to the heart that a true ecological conversion can take place,” Pope Leo said, saying, “We must shift from collecting data to caring, and from environmental discourse to an ecological conversion that transforms both personal and communal lifestyles.”

For believers, he said, “We 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.”

Integral ecology thrives on four relationships: with God, with others, with nature, and with ourselves, he said. “Through our commitment to them, we can grow in hope by living out the interdisciplinary approach of Laudato Si’ and the call to unity and collaboration that flows from it.”

Pope Leo also expressed his hope that a number of upcoming U.N. summits, including
the 2025 Climate Change Conference being held in Brazil in November, “will listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, families, Indigenous peoples, involuntary migrants, and believers throughout the world.”

“I encourage everyone, especially young people, parents, and those who work in local and national administrations and institutions, to play their part in finding solutions for today’s cultural, spiritual, and educational challenges, always striving tenaciously for the common good,” he added.

Among the participants who spoke during the conference’s first session in the presence of the pope was Brazil’s minister of environment and climate change, Marina Silva, and the former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has long been involved in initiatives for the protection of creation.

Indicating Pope Leo, Schwarzenegger said he was in the presence of a true “action hero” because of his election as pope and leader of a city-state whose goal is to become the first carbon-neutral state in the world.

Pope Leo later quipped in his opening remarks that “if there is indeed an action hero with us this afternoon, it is all of you who are working together to make a difference.”

Schwarzenegger outlined how he continued to help take aggressive action on fighting
climate change while he was
governor of the state of California from 2003 to 2011, reducing greenhouse gases by 25 percent and promoting other green initiatives.

Warnings that environmental legislation would ruin the state’s economy were “a bunch of nonsense,” he said. “Today, California has the strictest environmental laws in the United States, and we are No. 1 economically” in the U.S. and “the fourth largest economy in the world” with a $4 trillion GDP.

Instead of people “whining” and wondering what to do, he said, everyone should “get to work” because “everyone has the power” to do something, Schwarzenegger said.