Pope, faith leaders sign joint climate appeal before summit
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis and dozens of religious leaders on Monday signed a joint appeal to governments to commit to ambitious targets at the upcoming U.N. climate conference, while promising to do their own part to lead their faithful into more sustainable behavior.
“We have inherited a garden; we must not leave a desert to our children,” said the appeal, which was signed at a formal ceremony in the Apostolic Palace before being handed over to the head of the COP26 conference, Alok Sharma.
For the religious leaders, care for the environment is a moral imperative to preserve God’s creation for future generations and to support communities most vulnerable to climate change.
It’s an argument Francis has made repeatedly and most comprehensively in a 2015 encyclical, “Praised Be” and was echoed Monday by imams, rabbis, patriarchs and reverends who shared how their faith traditions interpreted the call, many of them insisting that faith and science must listen to each other to save the planet.
“Faith and Science: An Appeal for COP26” is the latest initiative to rally momentum and outrage ahead of the Oct. 31-Nov. 12 summit in Glasgow, Scotland that experts say is a make-or-break chance to curb greenhouse gas emissions. It follows a youth climate summit in Milan last week and an earlier appeal by three Christian leaders: Francis, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.
They were joined Monday by leaders of other major faith groups representing Sunni and Shiite Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, Sikhism and more.
Conspicuously absent was the Dalai Lama. The Vatican has excluded the Tibetan spiritual leader from interfaith events for years to not...
