Pope Francis Calls Coronavirus Pandemic One of ‘Nature’s Responses’ Amid Climate Crisis

Pope Francis has called the coronavirus one of “nature’s responses” to people ignoring the current climate crisis as the death toll worldwide prepares to surpass 83,500. In an interview published in Commonwealth and The Tablet Wednesday, the Catholic religious leader called the global pandemic an opportunity to reconsider production and consumption, as well as to re-embrace nature.

“We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?” the Pope said. “I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s responses.”

He added, “What we are living now is a place of conversion, and we have the chance to begin. So let’s not let it slip from us, and let’s move ahead. …We can either get depressed and alienated – through media that can take us out of our reality – or we can get creative.”

Explaining what he meant by conversion, the Pope added, “Go down into the underground, and pass from the hyper-virtual, fleshless world to the suffering flesh of the poor. This is the conversion we have to undergo. And if we don’t start there, there will be no conversion.” The pontifex added that the virus revealed how “all our thinking, like it or not, has been shaped around the economy” and that in “the world of finance it has seemed normal to sacrifice [people], to practise a politics of the throwaway culture, from the beginning to the end of life.”

Francis also criticized the treatment of homeless people during this time, saying, “A photo appeared the other day of a parking lot in Las Vegas where they [the homeless] had been put in quarantine. And the hotels were empty. But the homeless cannot go to a hotel. …This is the moment to see the poor.”

The 83-year-old Francis, who has a damaged lung from an illness in his 20s, is at an increased risk for COVID-19, but has tested negative twice and is maintaining a distance from other people at the Vatican, which has been closed to the public amid the global health crisis.