Consciousness
The Vatican speaks out
‘Vatican’s call for divestment is a breath of hope in times when faith is more needed than ever’.
20 June 2020
This article first appeared in our Earth Day 2026 issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
It is important to recall that, on 22 April 2020 – the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day – Pope Francis dedicated his weekly general audience to speaking about the importance of caring for the Earth.
‘Today we celebrate the fiftieth Earth Day’, Pope Francis said. ‘This is an occasion for renewing our commitment to love and care for our common home and for the weaker members of our human family.’
‘We have failed to care for the Earth, our garden-home’, Pope Francis continued; ‘we have failed to care for our brothers and sisters. We have sinned against the Earth, against our neighbours and ultimately against the Creator, the benevolent Father who provides for everyone and desires us to live in communion and flourish together.’
‘In today’s celebration of Earth Day’, Pope Francis concluded, ‘we are called to renew our sense of sacred respect for the Earth, for it is not just our home but also God’s home. This should make us all the more aware that we stand on holy ground! It will help if people at all levels of society come together to create a popular movement ‘from below’. The Earth Day we are celebrating today was itself born in precisely this way. We can each contribute in our own small way.’
One of the greatest blessings in my life was the opportunity to serve as coordinator of the ‘Ecology and Creation’ sector at the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, immediately after Laudato Si’ (Praised Be), Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical letter on the care of our common home, was published in 2015. During those years, I got to know Pope Francis a little more closely.
I believe the most significant legacy of Pope Francis is the constant invitation, extended in Laudato Si’ to everyone of goodwill, to care for the Earth. Hardly a fortnight after its publication, Dale Jamieson of New York State University described it as ‘the most important environmental text of the twenty-first century’.
Following Pope Francis’s death, an editorial in Nature paid homage to his remarkable leadership in framing the protection of our common home ‘as a moral imperative’, and lauded Laudato Si’ as ‘a timely statement from an important leader’.
During the dozen or so years of his pontificate, Pope Francis continued to challenge us ‘to listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor’ (Laudato Si’, 49). However, the cries of the Earth and the poor are only getting louder and more painful.
As Pope Francis himself acknowledged in the 2023 apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum: ‘with the passage of time, I have realised that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.’
We humans are a very late arrival on the evolutionary stage. To place ourselves in perspective, modern humans were not around for 99.99% of the Earth’s nearly 4.5 billion years of geological history. However, the future of the splendid epoch of human flourishing, in which faiths and religions were born, empires and civilisations were built and collapsed, arts and sciences were created and cultures and languages were shaped, will be determined by our choices over the next few decades.
We have a huge responsibility on our shoulders. To quote once again a phrase often repeated by Pope Francis: ‘We have received a garden from the Creator, we cannot leave a desert to our children!’
May the celebration of Earth Day 2026 fill us with renewed inspiration and hope. Let us make our own the prayer of Pope Francis at the end of Laudato Si’: May our generation be known for having brought the world back to life; for having fulfilled our common responsibility to care for our common home; for having brought healing to our lives, that we may protect the world and not prey on it.
ABOUT JOSHTROM ISAAC KUREETHADAM
Joshtrom is the former coordinator of the Sector on Ecology and Creation in the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
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