Glasgow, UK
Reuters
Pope Francis said on Tuesday that the twin wounds inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change were comparable to those caused by a global conflict and should be confronted in the same way.
Pope Francis attends the weekly general audience at the Paul VI Audience Hall, at the Vatican, on 13th October. PICTURE: Reuters/Guglielmo Mangiapane/File photo.
In a message to the UN COP26 climate talks read in Glasgow by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Francis also said rich countries had an outstanding “ecological debt” with poorer countries because of the disproportionate use of natural resources from developing nations by advanced ones.
“The wounds inflicted on our human family by the COVID-19 pandemic and the phenomenon of climate change are comparable to those resulting from a global conflict,” he said.
He called for the implementation of collegial and farsighted action “as in the aftermath of the Second World War” in which nations show solidarity and cooperation for the good of all, particularly the weakest.
Countries with greater means should take the lead in “decarbonisation in the economic system and in people’s lives” and provide more support to the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Rich countries owed an “ecological debt” to make amends for the “disproportionate use of the natural resources of one’s own and of other countries”, he said.
“Now is the time to act, urgently, courageously and responsibly,” he said.
“The young, who in recent years have strongly urged us to act, will only inherit the planet we choose to leave to them, based on the concrete choices we make today. Now is the moment for decisions that can provide them with reasons for hope and trust in the future,” Francis said.
The 84-year-old Pope, who has made protection of the environment a cornerstone of his pontificate, had said several times that he hoped to attend COP26, but the Vatican announced on 8th October that Parolin would head its delegation. It gave no explanation.
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Earlier, during a visit to a military cemetery on the day Catholics remember their dead, the Pope urged arms manufacturers to “stop”, because war “swallows up the children of the homeland”.
On All Souls Day, Francis said a Mass at the French military cemetery in Rome, with its rows of white crosses the burial place of about 1,900 French and Moroccan soldiers killed in World War II.
Francis, who visits a cemetery each year on the day of remembrance, laid white roses and stopped to pray at some of the tombs and mentioned that one read “Unknown, Died for France, 1944.”
“Not even a name. But in the heart of God there are all our names. This is the tragedy of war,” he said in an improvised sermon.
“I am sure that all of these who were called to defend the homeland and went with good will are with the Lord,” Francis said.
“But…do we fight enough so that there are no wars, so that there are no economies of countries that are strengthened by the weapons industry?” he said.
“These tombs are a message of peace. Stop brothers and sisters, stop. Stop, arms manufacturers, stop!” he said, calling those buried at the cemetery among the many “victims of war, which swallows up the children of the homeland”.
Pope Francis lays down a white rose at French Military Cemetery in Rome, Italy, on 2nd November. PICTURE: Reuters/ Remo Casilli.
Francis has made many calls for disarmament and has said that nuclear weapons should be banned because even their possession for deterrent reasons is “perverse” and indefensible.
When the location of the Mass was announced last month, an Italian group protested, saying the choice was an offence to victims of Moroccan soldiers, known as Goumiers, an auxiliary unit of the French military when France was still the colonial power.
They committed many random murders and raped many Italian women in the countryside between Naples and Rome as allied forces moved up the Italian peninsula.
One such incident was immortalised in the 1960 neo-realist film by Vittorio De Sica, Two Women, starring Sophia Loren, which told the story of a woman and her daughter who were both raped by Moroccan soldiers south of Rome.
