Pope Francis turned the climate crisis into a global moral reckoning, but as the planet warms, his loss leaves a gaping hole in the fight for climate justice.
Chico Harlan reports for The Washington Post.
In short:
- Francis transformed the papacy into a moral megaphone for climate action, directly challenging fossil fuel giants and world leaders to change course.
- Despite his urgency, the world’s biggest polluters ramped up emissions, and political backlash made climate action a wedge issue rather than a universal cause.
- Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si, inspired a wave of environmental movements, but his death raises questions about who will carry the torch — and whether the Vatican will prioritize climate again.
Key quote:
“I now think the fight against climate change is lost. I see a huge vacuum, and I don’t know who is going to fill it.”
— Veerabhadran Ramanathan, member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences
Why this matters:
With Laudato Si, Pope Francis' groundbreaking 2015 encyclical, he flipped the script on how faith, morality, and science could converge to confront an overheating planet. He became perhaps the closest thing we have had to a climate prophet, reminding a fractured world that our war on nature was a war on the poor.
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