At his weekly general audience in the Vatican’s San Damaso courtyard on Wednesday, Pope Francis lamented the negative effects of global warming and stated that the abuse of ecosystems is a “grave sin.”
“All forms of life are interconnected, and our health depends on that of the ecosystems that God created and entrusted to us to care for,” the pope told the crowd. “Abusing them, on the other hand, is a grave sin that damages us, and harms us, and makes us sick.”
He said that “it is easy to fall prey to an unbalanced and arrogant anthropocentrism, the ‘I’ at the centre of everything, which gives excessive importance to our role as human beings, positioning us as absolute rulers of all other creatures,” he added. “A distorted interpretation of biblical texts on creation has contributed to this misinterpretation, which leads to the exploitation of the earth to the point of suffocating it.”
“Today I was reading in the newspaper about those two great glaciers in Antarctica, near the Amundsen Sea: they are about to fall,” he said. “It will be terrible, because the sea level will rise and this will bring many, many difficulties and cause so much harm. And why? Because of global warming, not caring for the environment, not caring for the common home.”