The climate legacy of a pope and a patriarch

This year’s global celebration of Earth Day on April 22 had both sadness and celebration hanging over it. The sadness was that one of the world’s religious leaders who helped put a spiritual dimension into climate activism, Pope Francis, died on Monday. Among the many celebratory tributes to him was widespread praise for his missives citing a love of God and others – rather than fear – as the basis for stewardship of Earth’s atmosphere.

Just days before his death, another fellow global church leader was celebrated. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of 300 million Eastern Orthodox Christians, won this year’s Templeton Prize. He was cited for his decades of work in promoting “a compelling moral and theological vision of humanity’s responsibility to care for the Earth,” as the John Templeton Foundation put it.

Bartholomew has been instrumental in bringing leaders of many faiths together to agree on ethical and spiritual reasons for shifting the human relationship with physical nature to one based on concepts of harmony. In 2021, for example, the heads of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches issued a joint message calling for the protection of nature, or what Bartholomew calls “the beauty and integrity of God’s creation.”

“Ecology is not a political or economic issue. It is mainly a spiritual and religious issue because God created and gave it to us to protect it, to cultivate it, to use it, but not to abuse it,” he told the foundation.

Many of the faith decrees on climate have pointed to a need to go beyond technological solutions. “Science alone cannot save the planet,” Bartholomew said in 2015. “Science will inform us about the world, but it cannot reach the depths of our soul and mind.”

Both he and Francis regularly pointed to spiritual solutions for individual greed and other forms of self-centeredness that lie behind environmental loss.

In particular, Francis sought to instill joy into climate activism. “Let us sing as we go. May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope,” he wrote.

They each found it easy to work across theological divides and develop common doctrine for climate action. “The earth unites us in a unique and extraordinary manner,” wrote Bartholomew in 2015 for Time.

And so, too, does Earth Day, now in its 55th year of celebration.