Pope Francis warns of ‘planetary crisis’ in message to Vatican’s Academy for Life
A Vatican flag waves over the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. / Credit: Bohumil Petrik/CNA
Vatican City, Mar 3, 2025 / 11:50 am (CNA).
Pope Francis addressed what he called a “planetary crisis” that is adversely affecting the world in multiple ways in a message Monday to the general assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
“The term ‘polycrisis’ evokes the dramatic nature of the historical juncture we are currently witnessing, in which wars, climate changes, energy problems, epidemics, the migratory phenomenon, and technological innovation converge,” the pope said in his message, dated Feb. 26 from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital.
“The intertwining of these critical issues, which currently touch on various dimensions of life, lead us to ask ourselves about the destiny of the world and our understanding of it,” the pope said.
The Vatican academy is holding a meeting of scientists, theologians, and historians March 3-4 at the Augustinianum Conference Center near the Vatican on the theme “The End of the World? Crises, Responsibilities, Hopes.”
Academics from across the scientific and theological fields, including Nobel laureates, planetologists, physicists, biologists, paleoanthropologists, theologians, and historians, are attending the Pontifical Academy for Life’s plenary meeting this week.
In a presentation of the conference to journalists March 3, academy president Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia explained that “we felt the urgency to save the common human.”
“The frontier before us is a planetary frontier,” it affects all people, he said. With the meeting, the archbishop added, they desire “to design a future of hope for all without leaving anyone behind.”
“It’s obvious we cannot be indifferent,” Paglia said.
Pope Francis in his message said the first step in the face of the world’s “polycrisis” is to examine “with greater attention our representation of the world and the cosmos.”
“If we do not do this, and we do not seriously analyze our profound resistance to change, both as people and as a society, we will continue to do what we have always done with other crises,” he said, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which he said was “squandered” as an opportunity to transform consciences and social practices.
The pope also warned against “endorsing utilitarian deregulation and global neoliberalism means imposing the law of the strongest as the only rule; and it is a law that dehumanizes.”
Francis also lamented the “progressive irrelevance of international bodies, which are also undermined by shortsighted attitudes, concerned with protecting particular and national interests.”
He said people of goodwill must continue to be committed to more effective world organizations so that “a multilateralism is promoted that does not depend on changing political circumstances or the interests of the few.”
The pope said hope is of fundamental importance. “It does not consist of waiting with resignation but of striving with zeal toward true life, which leads well beyond the narrow individual perimeter,” he said.
Hope, Francis said, quoting Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Spe Salvi, “is linked to a lived union with a ‘people,’ and for each individual it can only be attained within this ‘we.’”