Before Pope Francis, climate change was seen primarily as either a political or a scientific issue. His encyclical reframed it as a spiritual issue. As the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, Pope Francis presented climate activism as a moral and spiritual duty for true believers, and he made climate one of the defining issues of his papacy. Over his 12 years as head of the Catholic Church, Francis repeatedly raised concerns about human-caused global warming resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. He urged people'including world leaders'to take meaningful action. When Argentina's Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, his vision for human justice and equality was so closely linked to nature that he chose the papal name Francis, honoring the patron saint of ecology. That belief, and the passion with which he advocated for it, helped influence the direction of global climate and energy policy'most notably the 2015 Paris Agreement. Francis's 2015...
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