Environment

John Mundell considers it “an incredible honor” that he was recently chosen as the director of the worldwide effort to put Pope Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home” into action.

Among the many environmental issues Pope Francis is concerned about, the one that “has shocked me the most,” he once said, is the way resources are increasingly being consumed faster than they can be regenerated.

In his message for the World Day of Prayer for Creation, the pope said the current climate crisis is a call for men and women, especially Christians, to “repent and modify our lifestyles and destructive systems.”

The care of the environment and the fight against climate change is not a lofty goal for humanity but a moral imperative, Pope Francis said.

The Vatican is now a formal party to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and has declared it intends also to formally join the 2015 Paris Agreement.