Father. Brother. Mother Earth.

by Damian | Apr 23, 2025 | Deep Thoughts, News, Writing | 0 comments

Bill McKibben’s most recent Substack post paid tribute to Pope Francis, calling him “perhaps the world’s greatest environmental champion.”

Bill’s right. It may be hard to believe that such a gentle soul could be such an eco-warrior, but his sense of justice demanded it.

Bill’s post is behind a paywall – you might be able to get to it for free if you enter your email address. (I’m a proud tree-hugging subscriber to Mr. McKibben’s Substack… it’s called The Crucial Years.)

Bill quotes from Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si (Latin for “Praised be”), which “brought moral resolve to the question of climate change.”

A few choice quotes from it:

(men and women have) intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand.

However “human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.” With the great power that technology has afforded us, it’s become “easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.”

And more from Bill McKibben’s post:

Francis was very much a pragmatist, and one advised by excellent scientists and engineers. As a result, he had a clear technological preference: the rapid spread of solar power everywhere. He favored it because it was clean, and because it was liberating—the best short-term hope of bringing power to those without it, and leaving that power in their hands, not the hands of some oligarch somewhere.

As a result, he followed up Laudato Si with a letter last summer, Fratello Sole, which reminds everyone that the climate crisis is powered by fossil fuel, and which goes on to say

There is a need to make a transition to a sustainable development model that reduces greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, setting the goal of climate neutrality. Mankind has the technological means to deal with this environmental transformation and its pernicious ethical, social, economic and political consequences, and, among these, solar energy plays a key role.

As a result, he ordered the Vatican to begin construction of a field of solar panels on land it owned near Rome—an agrivoltaic project that would produce not just food but enough solar power to entirely power the city-state that is the Vatican. It is designed, in his words, to provide “the complete energy sustenance of Vatican City State.” That is to say, this will soon be the first nation powered entirely by the sun.

Praised be, indeed!

More from Bill’s post:

The level of emotion—of love—in this decision is notable. The pope named “Laudato Si” (“Praised be”) after the first two words of his namesake’s Canticle to the Sun, and Fratello Sole was even more closely tied—those are the words that the first Francis used to address Brother Sun. I reprint the opening of the Canticle here, in homage to both men, and to their sense of humble communion with the glorious world around us.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

The world is a poorer place this morning. But far richer for his having lived.

Amen, Brother Bill!

Pope Francis is now basking in the eternal light of God’s love. But those of us left on this one earth we share could do a much better job harnessing the light of Brother Sun, and quit squeezing the planet dry beyond every limit.