ROME — Pope Francis connected the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic to climate change Wednesday, insisting that together they call for the repentance of humanity.
“The eruption of the pandemic, within the broader context of global warming, the ecological crisis and the dramatic loss of biodiversity, represents a summons to our human family to rethink its course, to repent and to undertake an ecological conversion,” the pope said in a message Wednesday for the plenary meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
This conversion must draw on “all our God-given gifts and talents in order to promote a ‘human ecology’ worthy of our innate dignity and common destiny,” the pontiff added.
This was not the first time that Francis suggested a possible connection between the coronavirus and human negligence in protecting creation and addressing global warming.
Last April, British journalist Austen Ivereigh asked the pope whether the COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity for an “ecological conversion,” the pontiff reasserted his belief that the pandemic is “nature’s response” to humanity’s failure to care for the planet.
“There is an expression in Spanish: ‘God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives,’” Francis said in the interview. “We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that a year and a half ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had melted? Who speaks now of the floods?”
“I don’t know if it is revenge, but it is nature’s response,” he concluded.
The pope expressed a similar idea in March, asserting that the coronavirus pandemic is nature’s cry for humans to take better care of creation.
Asked by a journalist whether the COVID-19 pandemic is nature’s way of taking “revenge” on humanity, the pontiff suggested that nature is calling for attention.
“Fires, earthquakes … nature is throwing a tantrum so that we will take responsibility for the care of nature,” he said.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.