On the sultry day of January 2018, Pope Francis addressed 100,000 followers in the Port of Maldonado in Peru, not far from where gold mining ravaged, where the Amazon rainforest was raging around the size of Colorado. “The Amazon people may never have been threatened by their own land as they are now,” he told the crowd. He also condemned the excavation industry and conservation efforts, “under the guise of protecting forests, hoarding forest land expansion and negotiating with them, resulting in oppression of the indigenous peoples.”
Francis condemned the infinite consumerism that drove Amazon’s destruction, supported those who said the indigenous people’s custody of their own territory, and urged all to defend isolated tribes. “Their cosmic vision and wisdom have a lot to teach us people who do not belong to their culture,” he said.
The words of the indigenous leader Julio Cusurichi Palacios, who was at the stadium that day, the head of the Catholic Church (claiming 1.4 billion members and a long history of violence against indigenous peoples worldwide) were welcomed and important.
“Seldom world leaders talk about our issues,” he said after Pope Francis’ death last month. “There are few world leaders talking about our issues, and the pope said, historically publicly violated the rights of indigenous peoples,” he said. “Let’s hope that the new pope is someone who can continue to enforce the Pope’s death has been talking about.”
Francis’s 12 years at Pontiff has fundamentally reshaped how the world’s most powerful religious institution approaches moral and moral appeals to protect the planet. In addition to invoking indigenous rights, Francis recognized the role of the church in colonization and believed that climate change was a moral issue arising from rampant consumption and materialism. As the Trump administration demolished climate action and cut funding to indigenous peoples around the world, and far-right politics continued to rise globally – experts saw the choice of Robert Francis Prevost in the seat, or Pope Leo Xiv, who is now famous, a clear credibility that his former leaders did not go anywhere on the faith-based climate justice movement.
In 2015, Pope Francis published his historic Pope letter, or the encyclopedia of laudato si’. In the approximately 180 pages of the document, he explicitly regarded the pollution of heating planets as a global problem that disproportionately affected the poor in the world and condemned wealthy countries like the United States for their contribution to the climate crisis. Francis has done something he hasn’t done before: his human degeneration of the environment is not only an environmental problem, but also a social and moral problem. Laudato Si establishes a definite link between faith, climate change and social justice and makes it the purpose of Catholic doctrine.
“Pope Francis usually says we have a society that is thrown away. We throw away people, we throw away nature… and we do need a culture based on care,” said Christopher Cox, executive director of the Seventh Generation Responsible Investment Alliance. “This means taking care of people, especially the poorest, most vulnerable, most marginalized. We also need greater care to create. We have gotten a beautiful planet, and we consume at a rate that is far beyond the ability to sustain life for a long time.”
Francis, the first Latin American pope, was unique in implicitly embracing certain elements of liberation theology, a Catholic social justice movement calling for the liberation of marginalized nations from oppression. Although Francis occasionally criticized the Marxist element of the doctrine and never fully supported it, many observers believe that his statements about poverty and indigenous peoples reflect the central values of the doctrine.
“From his pope, propaganda, awareness of Catholic and Indigenous languages in Catholicism, by far the most extensive official understanding of Catholic contributions to Catholicism, to date, is the most extensive official understanding of Catholicism’s indigenous contribution to Catholicism,” said Eben Levey, a history professor at Alfred University. Since conquering America and forcing indigenous people to accept religion, many indigenous communities have made Catholicism themselves over the centuries, and more church leaders have embraced the notion that there are multiple ways to become Catholic and Catholic and Indigenous cultures that can exist simultaneously.
A year after becoming the Pope, Francis approved the use of two Mayan languages, namely tzotzil and tzeltal, for sacraments such as baptism and confession. In 2015, he expanded the list to include the Aztec language Nahuatl and visited Mexico in 2016 to celebrate the mass of Tzeltal, Tzotzil and Chol.
In 2022, Francis officially apologized to Canada for residential schools for Indigenous children who tore their families apart, resulting in the deaths of many people who were later buried in unmarked graves. The following year, he rejected the discovery doctrine, a religious concept used by colonists to justify illegal seizure of land from native peoples and became part of the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that described Native Americans as “barbarians.”
“The discovery doctrine is not part of the Catholic church,” said Pope Francis, who strongly supported the global implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. He also established a clear link between these rights and climate action: In 2023, he made it clear that indigenous peoples are crucial to addressing climate change, when he said: “It is a serious mistake to ignore original communities when protecting the planet, rather than to say huge injustice.”
But Pope Francis’ progressiveism has its limitations. In 2019, he called for a meeting of church leaders, called the Bishops’ Conference, to address the Pan American region to address issues affecting the Amazon Basin. Indigenous Catholics who attended the meeting proposed illegal logging and violence against land defenders and proposed reforms. “The ancestor wisdom of the indigenous peoples affirms that Mother Earth has a female face,” the document emerged from the gathering and urged the church to give women more leadership roles and allow married deacons to be appointed as pastors. In response, Francis condemned the “injustice and crime” of the companies that destroyed Amazon, but refused to accept the proposal to make church leadership more inclusive of women and married men.
Francis’ climate activism is also constrained. Nadia Ahmad, associate professor at the Barrie University School of Law, said he changed how religious institutions view the climate crisis, posing a failure to act cruelly injustice against the most vulnerable, but could have carried out “more direct institutional action.” Although the former pope publicly supported renewable energy adoption, called for fossil fuel investments and prompted churches around the world to go to solar, he did not mandate him to see a “radical energy transition” between parishes, schools and hospitals. Ahmed said the work he accomplished “cannot get more amplification and more accountability.”
But this limitation may be caused by the ambivalent politics played within the church – many traditional conservative Catholics, especially in the United States, resisted Francis’ progressive doctrine. A 2021 study found that over a five-year period, most American bishops were “almost silent, sometimes misleading,” with their formal messages passing to parishioners, involving climate change and the pope’s famous encyclopedia.
Although Pope Leo Xiv was praised for his advocacy for defending the rights of immigrants and workers – his eponymous Leo XIII ruled him from 1878 to 1903 as a historic Catholic champion of social justice and equality – the new pope was sparse in the history of the new pope who was directly involved in climate change.
Nevertheless, Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, believes that the new pope’s demand for “verbal to action” last year serves as a promising signal that he will continue Francis’ commitment to conveying the urgency of warming the world. After the Trump administration’s administration’s attack on climate action, eliminating environmental protection and indigenous rights, the meeting’s unprecedented decision to choose the first pope was not lost.
“It could be a signal,” she said, “The United States, back to the world community, back to a planetary future, and we work together to create a future worthy of our children and our children’s children.”
Leo grew up in Chicago and is a citizen of the United States and Peru, and spent decades as a missionary and bishop before Francis became a cardinal in 2023. He speaks five languages fluently, and some Quechua (Quechuan) is an indigenous Indian language.
According to historian and associate clinical professor Matthew Casey, Leo’s human rights violations against the government while working in Peru in the 1990s – although he was unclearly distinguished in the political struggle between Maoist rebels and then-officer Alberto Fujimori. Casey said that despite this, his reaction to the country’s authoritarianism could be glimpsed at his position as a pope. “Who is abusing human rights, he is on the side of the people,” he said.
In 2016, the possible pope spoke at a meeting in Brazil, where participants talked about the Amazon rainforests and threats from indigenous peoples living there. He praised Francis’ encyclopedia, calling the document “very important” and said “from this clear expression of the church’s concern for all creation.” For Casey, it shows that Pope Lion Fourteen, like his predecessor, is conscious of issues affecting indigenous peoples, such as rampant degradation of the environment.
“Both Francis and Prevost both work in Europe or the United States to make their impossible ways the same as native, because indigenous politics in Latin America are so different,” Casey said. More than a week after the meeting, the entire Peruvian community in Peru was still celebrating Pope Leo’s choice.
Alfred University historian Levi said that Francis and Leo shared experiences with marginalized communities harmed by colonialism and climate change and their commitment to social justice in the church’s mission makes particularly meaningful in this political moment.
“Global, we see a revival of super-right politics, and the Catholic Church next to the United Nations is one of the few multilateral organizations that can respond to our modern or contemporary moments in some form or way,” he said.
This article originally appeared in Grist AT, a nonprofit independent media organization dedicated to telling climate solutions and formal future stories. Learn more at grist.org.
