As prepared for delivery on February 3, 2025
Your Holiness, it is a great honor to be here with you today. I am humbled by the invitation and want to express my sincere gratitude for the opportunity to offer these remarks.
The threat of ecological devastation – which encompasses the twin climate and biodiversity crises – is a burden we have placed upon the children of our planet. Through no action of their own, they are inheriting a planet on the precipice. As you warned in 2018, on the third anniversary of the release of your encyclical, Laudato Si, “there is a real danger that we will leave future generations only rubble, deserts and refuse.”
You have described the spiritual crisis we face as stemming in part from the willful blindness that prevents so many from seeing the way in which our economic system drives us towards exploitation—of both people and the planet—at the expense of our moral values.
Indeed, humanity was long blind to the threat from greenhouse gas emissions, in part because the single biggest driver of climate change—carbon dioxide—is an invisible, odorless, and tasteless inert gas. However, scientists – and more recently Mother Nature – have made the reality of the climate crisis plainly visible to people everywhere as the damage being inflicted continues to worsen faster than we are deploying solutions.
An extremely important feature of the climate crisis that many did not really see clearly for a long time – especially prior to Laudato Si—is the now well-established evidence that a warming planet disproportionately affects the most vulnerable among us, including especially the poor, those marginalized by discrimination, infants and the elderly, women, the mentally ill, the unhoused, and those who work outdoors. It is a tragic reality that those who have contributed the least to causing the crisis are facing its worst impacts.
Perhaps those of us who are well off and comfortable in our lives are vulnerable to yet another variety of blindness: maybe we just don’t really see the plight of the poor and the vulnerable in a way that compels us to action. Once again, in your words, if for whatever reason we don’t really want to see, we don’t see.
But what we cannot see, the children of our planet can sense all around them. They feel the weight of existential dread caused by decades of inaction. Children are innocent and yet they hold the greatest burden of all as they grow up in a world of ever-increasing climate chaos. Indeed, their eyes are wide open.
In three of the four Gospels, the story is told of Jesus’s parable of the unfaithful servant in which a master leaves on a journey and instructs his servant to take care in protecting the household and being a good steward. Thieves came and ransacked the house. And the excuse given was that the servant was asleep, and the excuse is rejected.
We have a duty to be wakeful not just by opening our eyes, but by opening our minds and hearts as well.
The unprecedented groundswell of youth activism on the climate and ecological crises we face have raised public consciousness to new levels.
But, to once again quote your prescient words, “we must not place the burden on the next generations to take on the problems caused by the previous ones.”
Those that hold power today must alter our ways of thinking; our new thinking must result in deep changes that transform our current systems of economics and politics, giving way toward a more just and ecologically-minded system that puts environmental and social justice at the center of our plans and efforts.
But for any who doubt that we as human beings can summon sufficient political will to solve the climate crisis, always remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.