Pope Francis told a group of lawyers that he could like to introduce the category of “ecological sin” into official Catholic teaching.
“We must introduce – we are thinking about it – in the Catechism of the Catholic Church the sin against ecology, the ecological sin against the common home, because it is a duty,” the pope said Friday in addressing participants in an international conference on penal law.
More specifically, Francis said, are all those actions that can be considered as “ecocide,” for instance, “the massive contamination of air, land and water resources, the large-scale destruction of flora and fauna, and any action capable of producing an ecological disaster or destroying an ecosystem.”
Ecocide “is to be understood as the loss, damage or destruction of the ecosystems of a given territory, so that its utilization by inhabitants has been or can be seen as severely compromised,” he said, adding that such a sin is “a fifth category of crimes against peace, which should be recognised as such by the international community.”
The pontiff said that such actions are “usually” caused by corporations, and “an elementary sense of justice would require” that they be punished for them.
An ecological sin is “an action or omission against God, against one’s neighbour, the community and the environment,” Francis said, quoting the Fathers of the recently concluded Pan-Amazon Regional Synod. “It is a sin against future generations and is manifested in acts and habits of pollution and destruction of the harmony of the environment, in transgressions against the principles of interdependence and in the breaking of networks of solidarity between creatures.”
Above and beyond its sinfulness, failure to care for the environment is an injustice and a crime, Francis suggested and should be legally enforced. “I would like to appeal to all the leaders and actors in this area to contribute their efforts to ensuring adequate legal protection for our common home,” he said.
The pope’s words coincided with the release of a new survey by the Pew Research Center, which found that church-going Americans accept their clergy’s on spiritual matters, but generally distrust their advice on issues such as climate change.