Pope Francis: Pandemic Is 'Nature's Response' To Human Inaction Over Climate Change

Pope Francis Says Pandemic Is ‘Nature’s Response’ to Human Inaction over Climate Change

THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.

Pope Francis said he believes the Chinese coronavirus pandemic is “certainly nature’s response” to humanity’s failure to address the “partial catastrophes” wrought by human-induced climate change.

Asked by British journalist Austen Ivereigh whether the COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity for an “ecological conversion,” the pontiff reasserted his belief that humanity has provoked nature by not responding adequately to the climate crisis.

“There is an expression in Spanish: ‘God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives,’” Francis said in the interview published Wednesday. “We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that a year and a half ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?”

“I don’t know if it is nature’s revenge, but it is certainly nature’s response,” he added.

“Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger,” he said. “Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world.”

Late last month the pope expressed this same belief to a Spanish journalist, insisting that the coronavirus pandemic is nature’s cry for humans to take better care of creation.

Asked whether the COVID-19 pandemic is nature’s way of taking “revenge” on humanity, the pontiff suggested that nature is calling for attention.

“Fires, earthquakes … nature is throwing a tantrum so that we will take care of her,” he said.

Last December as well, the pope said that natural disasters such as a massive storm that struck northern Italy in the fall of 2018 are nature’s way of sounding an alarm to make us more environmentally engaged.

The earth “now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her,” Francis wrote. “We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.”