How Pope Francis pushed to address climate crisis

Two of his key messages were ‘Lautado Si’ and ‘Laudate Deum’

Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic church, died on Monday (April 21, 2025) after months-long battle with pneumonia. Pope Francis was loved widely for a number of reasons, and one of them was his push to address the climate crisis.

Two of his key messages were Lautado Si and Laudate Deum.

In May 2015, Pope Francis wrote an encyclical to bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, highlighting the ecological crisis that the earth is facing.

This was, however, not the first instance when a Pope wrote a letter highlighting this. In his encyclical, Pope Francis referred to similar previous appeals – like the one by Pope Paul VI in 1971 where he said that the ecological crisis was a “a tragic consequence” of unchecked human activity: “Due to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation.” In his first encyclical, Pope Paul VI warned that human beings frequently seem “to see no other meaning in their natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption,” and later called for a “global ecological conversion.”

Pope Francis chose his papal name after St. Francis of Assisi, who he referred to in his encyclical as the “patron saint of all who study and work in the area of ecology, and he is also much loved by non-Christians.”

Pope Francis appealed to the people to protect “our common home” while seeking “sustainable and integral development.” He suggested a dialogue about the future of the earth to address environmental challenges.

“Many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions,” he wrote in his encyclical.