There is a particular secluded garden at the Vatican’s summer residence, the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo, where past popes have gone to mull weighty issues and pray for God’s guidance amid crumbling Roman ruins, pruned hedges, a pond full of goldfish and a solitary statue of the Virgin Mary.
The garden and its nearby grounds have become a favored place for the newest pope, Leo XIV, to reflect on nature. And on Wednesday he will be at Castel Gandolfo to give his first address on climate change.
He has already spoken briefly, if forcefully, on the subject. “Grave inequalities and the greed that fuels them are spawning deforestation, pollution and the loss of biodiversity,” Leo said a few weeks ago. “Extreme natural phenomena caused by climate changes provoked by human activity are growing in intensity and frequency.”
But his remarks at a climate conference on Wednesday are expected to be his fullest yet on the subject. They will be closely watched, as they are intended to mark the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, a groundbreaking papal document written by his predecessor, Francis, that essentially updated the Catholic Church’s teachings to specifically address climate change.
That document, known as an encyclical, urged Catholics to undergo a “profound interior conversion” to reconsider the effects of consumer culture on the health of the planet. It was released just months before the landmark Paris Agreement was reached, in which the world’s nations pledged to work toward limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages.
The 2015 encyclical was widely seen as a nudge toward negotiators in Paris. At the time, at least 10 world leaders cited Laudato Si in speeches at the United Nations climate gathering. Leo’s speech on Wednesday may signal whether he is simply inheriting Francis’ language on climate change, or putting his own spin on it.
Even if the Vatican doesn’t have much practical influence over global climate policies, nearly a fifth of the world’s population is Catholic and the combined area of the land it owns is larger than Texas.
Francis tried to wield that influence over people outside the church’s purview, and didn’t always succeed. In 2017, he urged President Trump not to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. (Mr. Trump did so anyway.) And in 2023, as global collaboration reached a post-pandemic nadir, Francis updated Laudato Si with a 13-page document that more or less lamented how his encyclical had gone unheeded.
Vatican-watchers have said Leo’s views on other matters of significance have been hard to pin down. But on climate change, they say, it is clear that he is moved by the topic, and particularly its disproportionate harm to poor and vulnerable people.
This summer, he greenlighted a plan to use solar power for all the Vatican’s energy needs. In September, he inaugurated a new 55-acre educational center in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo focused on sustainable farming, ecological stewardship and other teachings of Laudato Si.
In a homily in a garden there, he told an audience of the education center’s staff and a smattering of Vatican officials that “we must pray for the conversion of many people inside and outside the Church who still do not recognize the urgency of caring for our common home.” He said the world was seeing increasingly damaging natural disasters and climatic uncertainty “largely or partly caused by human excesses in our lifestyle, everything we do.”
On a smaller scale, Leo’s usage of the secluded garden recognizes it as what he has described as a “natural cathedral” that other popes have used as a meditative refuge. In 2003 after spending a meditative day in the garden, John Paul II sent an emissary to President George W. Bush urging him not to invade Iraq. Ten years later, Benedict XVI pondered whether his declining health was reason enough to retire, according to the Rev. Manuel Dorantes, the management director of the Laudato Si Higher Education Center.
At this week’s conference near the palace, Leo will be joined by a who’s who of ardent supporters of sweeping policies aimed at addressing the primary driver of climate change, the ever-increasing burning of fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases that trap heat in the planet’s atmosphere.
Other speakers include Laurence Tubiana, who is often referred to as the architect of the Paris Agreement, Bill McKibben, an author and prominent climate activist, Katharine Hayhoe, a renowned climate scientist, and Marina Silva, Brazil’s firebrand minister of environment and climate change. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor and former California governor who has been outspoken on climate issues, is expected to attend as well.
Because Laudato Si is a set of teachings, and not a directive toward any specific action, its effects over the past decade are difficult to measure. But Ms. Hayhoe said that church can be where some of the most deep-seated changes in perspective happen, including her own.
“The motivation to act comes from the heart. I’m a scientist, and that’s true for me too,” she said. “The reason I became a climate scientist was from the heart — I was planning to become an astrophysicist. Being a Christian, I believe that if we take the Bible seriously we’d be at the front of the line, demanding action.”
Lorna Gold, who leads the Laudato Si Movement, a Vatican-affiliated nonprofit that is organizing the conference, said that before Francis’ document, climate change was at best a “niche topic” in Catholic circles. But following Laudato Si, she said, concrete steps were taken by, for example, Ireland’s bishops, who pledged to divest their churches from fossil fuel interests and to convert 30 percent of all parish-owned land back to wilderness.
“That has really caught the imagination of people,” said Ms. Gold.
The Catholic Church’s rank and file of cardinals and bishops, particularly those in Asia, Latin America and Africa where the church is growing the fastest, have been as explicit as Francis and Leo on their desire for action on climate change.
In July, regional bishops’ conferences from those three continents issued a joint document titled “A call for climate justice and the common home: ecological conversion, transformation and resistance to false solutions.” Cardinal Filipe Neri Ferrão, Archbishop of Goa and Daman in India, wrote that the message of the statement was “a call to conscience in the face of a system that threatens to devour creation, as if the planet were just another commodity.”
Max Bearak is a Times reporter who writes about global energy and climate policies and new approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
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