‘Listen to the cry of the Earth’: Pope Leo takes aim at climate change sceptics

Pope Leo XIV has taken aim at people who “ridicule those who speak of global warming” as he embraced Pope Francis’s 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’s 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’s creation and the peoples most harmed by its exploitation.

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 “will listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor”.

He did not name names but history’s first American pope spoke just days after Donald Trump complained, with false statements, to the UN general assembly about the “con job” 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.

Leo quoted Francis’s 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.

Citing Francis’s text, Leo recalled that some leaders had chosen to “deride 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”.

He called for a change of heart to truly embrace the environmental cause and said any Christian should be onboard.

“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,” he said, presiding on a stage that featured a large chunk of a melting glacier from Greenland and tropical ferns.

Leo has strongly taken up Francis’s 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’s first carbon-neutral state.