Pope Francis issues urgent call to save a planet near 'the breaking point'

Pope Francis on Wednesday once again implored the world to protect the suffering planet, lamenting in a major new document that scant progress had been made in the eight years since he refocused the Catholic Church more fully on environmental issues in a landmark treatise that catapulted him to the forefront of climate activism.

“With the passage of time, I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” Francis wrote in an update to his groundbreaking 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si.’” The newly urgent appeal was made public as a major assembly of global bishops and laypeople began in the Vatican to discuss key issues for the future of the church, including its role in safeguarding the environment.

In the near decade since global fanfare, plaudits from leaders and talk of a game-changing shift for the church greeted Francis’ first call to confront climate change, things have only gotten worse. The United Nations’ first official report card last month on the global climate treaty showed that countries have made only limited progress in staving off the most dangerous effects of global warming.

Wednesday’s document, an apostolic exhortation called “Laudate Deum,” or Praise God, amounted to a tacit acknowledgment that Francis’ initial appeal to save the planet has gone largely unheeded.

Addressed to “all people of good will on the climate crisis,” Francis’ 13-page document is a mix of status report, advocacy agenda, anti-corporate lament, spiritual meditation and appeal for a new multilateral world order with more power to protect the environment.

As in “Laudato Si,’” Francis, the first pope from the global south who has a clearly jaundiced eye toward American corporate and colonial interests, describes big business and the “elites of power” in his updated document as a corrupting, and environmentally devastating, force.

He scorned those who “have chosen to deride” facts and who instead “bring up allegedly solid scientific data.”

Some of those climate change skeptics among the hierarchy met in the Vatican assembly, called the Synod on Synodality, on Wednesday. Despite Francis’ efforts to add his voice to matters of global importance, his power is most felt within his own church. Organizers of the assembly said they would make a “contribution to the conservation of creation by choices that will offset the residual CO2 emissions produced” during the event.