Pope Francis Saw Defending the Climate as an Urgent Priority for the World

When Argentina’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, his vision for human justice and equality was so entwined with nature that he chose the papal name Francis, honoring the patron saint of ecology. That belief, and how passionately he advocated for it, influenced the course of global climate and energy policy and in particular the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Francis’s 2015 papal letter or encyclical, Laudato Si’ (“Praise Be to You”), was the first devoted to global warming. It tied together climate science, wealth inequality, consumption (what he lamented as a “throwaway culture”) and technology in a 40,000-word missive shared with the world’s more than 1 billion Catholics. His words could be blunt: “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he wrote.