The next pope will help decide the planet's fate
A symbolic turning point for U.S. climate policy, and by extension the world, happened when President Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels that his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had installed at the White House, signaling a return to business as usual — i.e., burning more fossil fuels and hastening a growing climate crisis.
After the death of Pope Francis, the Roman Catholic Church's choice of successor could be a similar sliding-doors moment. When much of the world, including its biggest economy, is retreating from climate activism and embracing a cynical climate "realism,' the Vatican has a chance to stand out by electing another vocal environmentalist to lead nearly 1.4 billion Catholics.
And as with Carter and Reagan, solar panels are involved again.
Roughly a decade before his death this weekend, Pope Francis had already established his credentials as the greenest pope of at least the fossil-fuel era. His landmark May 2015 encyclical Laudato Si' made a compelling spiritual and moral case for protecting "our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us,' but "now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.'
The document, which author Bill McKibben suggests was "arguably the most important piece of writing so far this millennium,' helped motivate world leaders to set the aggressive global-heating targets of the Paris accord later that year. It also inspired the Laudato Si' Movement, a network of hundreds of Catholic groups around the world dedicated to environmental protection and justice. The church's Laudato Si' Action Platform helps people, congregations and other groups find ways to take climate action.
Francis returned to the theme again and again, including his 2023 encyclical Laudate Deum, in which he expressed dismay that the world wasn't living up to the ideals of the Paris agreement. Since then, he had to witness the U.S. government falling back into the hands of an even more extreme anti-environmentalist than Reagan. U.S. President Donald Trump has attacked climate science, clean-energy funding, regulations and even the use of the word "climate.' One of the pope's last visitors was U.S. Vice President JD Vance, whose position on climate has shifted as his status within the Republican Party and donations from fossil-fuel companies have risen.
In a less-famous writing last June, Fratello Sole ("Brother Sun'), Francis ordered the construction of an agrivoltaic solar array on land on the outskirts of Rome, meant to provide enough juice for not only the Vatican's radio station there but the entire city-state — possibly making it "the first nation powered entirely by the sun,' McKibben points out. With fanfare, the Vatican displayed new solar panels on its museum roof last December.
The conclave (which will sadly not involve Ralph Fiennes) to pick the next pope will be a wrestling match between traditionalists and reformers of Francis' ilk, my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Howard Chua-Eoan notes. In that sense, Vatican politics may not be so different from regular politics, with its back-and-forth between liberals and conservatives. And just as much of the world's politics have swung rightward recently, the church's constituency has also grown more conservative. The next pope might consider environmental pleas a distraction from the office's traditional role.
Maybe that pope won't rip the solar panels from the Vatican roof. Maybe he'll even let that agrivoltaic project to go forward. No matter what he does, he can't possibly harm the climate cause as deeply as Trump and Vance are doing.
But by simply depriving the world of a powerful moral voice for action when so many other such voices are going quiet, a Catholic church leader that ignores the climate can still do plenty of harm. During those brief times when Francis was alive and Trump was in office, you could ironically look to a millennia-old religious institution as being more forward-thinking about the environment than the U.S. government. To lose that example would be tragic.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change.
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The Associated Press Jose Rey de Castro, a former member of the Sodalitium, speaks during an interview with the Associated Press in Lima, Peru, Wednesday, May 21, 2025. VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV made plenty of enemies helping dismantle a powerful Catholic movement whose leaders physically, sexually, spiritually and psychologically abused members. As Leo's past record of handling clergy sexual abuse cases comes under scrutiny, victims of the now-disgraced group are stepping up to defend him. These survivors say that starting in 2018, when Robert Prevost was a bishop in Peru, he met with them. He took their claims seriously when others did not. He got the Vatican involved and worked concretely to provide financial reparations for the harm they had endured. They credit him with helping arrange the key 2022 meeting with Pope Francis that triggered a Vatican investigation into the group, known as the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, that resulted in its suppression earlier this year. 'What can I say about him? That he listened to me,' said José Rey de Castro, a teacher who spent 18 years in the Sodalitium as the personal cook for its leader, Luis Fernando Figari. 'It seems obvious for a priest. But that's not the case, because the Sodalitium was very powerful.' A conservative army for God Figari founded the Sodalitium in Peru in 1971 as a lay community to recruit 'soldiers for God.' It was one of several Catholic societies born as a conservative reaction to the left-leaning liberation theology movement that swept through Latin America starting in the 1960s. At its height, the group counted about 1,000 core members and several times that in three other branches across South America and the United States. It was enormously influential in Peru and has its U.S. base in Denver. Starting in 2000, stories about Figari's twisted practices began to filter out in Peru when a former member wrote a series of articles in the magazine Gente. A formal accusation was lodged with the Lima archdiocese in 2011 but neither the local church nor the Holy See took concrete action until former member Pedro Salinas and journalist Paola Ugaz exposed the practices of Sodalitium in their 2015 book 'Half Monks, Half Soldiers.' In 2017, a report commissioned by the group's new leadership determined that the charismatic Figari was 'narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation of SCV members.' The report found that Figari sodomized his recruits and forced them to fondle him and one another, that he liked to watch them 'experience pain, discomfort and fear,' and humiliated them in front of others to enhance his control over them. Yet when members found the courage to escape and denounce the abuses they suffered, they say they often met a wall of silence and inaction from the Peruvian Catholic hierarchy and the Holy See. Both were slow to act against a movement that had been formally approved by St. John Paul II's Vatican, which had looked fondly on conservative, wealthy movements in Latin America, like the similarly-disgraced Mexican-based Legion of Christ. Prevost stands out But not Prevost, whom Francis made bishop of Chiclayo, Peru in 2014 and later was elected vice president of the Peruvian bishops conference. He headed the bishops' commission created to listen to victims of abuse, and became a critical 'bridge' between victims and Sodalitium, the victims say. Rey de Castro, the former Figari cook who got out in 2014 and now teaches public policy to Peruvian police, turned to Prevost in 2021. He had been critical of a 2016 Sodalitium reparations program that, according to the group, provided some $6.5 million in academic, therapeutic and financial support to nearly 100 Sodalitium victims over the years. He and Prevost met in the offices of the Peruvian bishops conference and stayed in touch via text message up until Prevost's election as pope. From the start, Rey de Castro said, 'Prevost was very clear in saying 'For me, Sodalitium doesn't have a charism,'' the church term for the fundamental inspiration and reason for a religious movement to exist. After their 2021 meeting, Prevost helped arrange a confidential settlement with Sodalitium, he said. 'For Prevost to get the Sodalitium to do something just was exceptional, which was more or less what happened,' he said in an interview in Lima. Salinas and Ugaz, for their part, say Prevost also stepped in when the Sodalitium started retaliating against them with legal action for their continued investigative reporting on the group. After the Sodalitium's archbishop of Piura, José Eguren, sued Salinas in 2018 for defamation, Prevost and the Vatican's ambassador to Peru helped craft a statement from the Peruvian bishops conference backing the journalists. 'It was the first time that anyone had done anything against the Sodalitium publicly,' Ugaz said. 'And not only did they make this declaration, but they communicated with Francis, told him what was happening and Francis got mad.' Ugaz and Salinas provided years of emails, text messages and anecdotes dating back to 2018 to demonstrate how committed Prevost was to the cause of the Sodalitium victims. While not all his initiatives succeeded, Prevost stepped in at critical junctions. 'I assure you I share your concern and we are looking for the best way to get the letter directly to the pope,' Prevost wrote one victim Dec. 11, 2018, about getting a letter from Sodalitium victims to Francis. 'I will continue working so that there is justice for all those who suffered at the hands of Sodalitium,' Prevost wrote another victim on Dec. 23, 2018. 'I ask forgiveness for the errors of the church.' After the Sodalitium criticism accelerated against Ugaz and Salinas, Prevost helped arrange for Ugaz to meet with Francis at the Vatican on Nov. 10, 2022, during which she laid out her findings and convinced Francis to send his top sex crimes investigators to Peru. Their 2023 investigation uncovered physical abuses 'including with sadism and violence, ' sect-like abuses of conscience, spiritual abuse, abuses of authority including the hacking of Ugaz's communications and economic abuses in administering church money. The probe also identified a publicity campaign some Sodalitium members had mounted against critics. The investigation resulted in Francis taking a series of initiatives, starting with the April 2024 resignation of Eguren which Prevost handled. It continued with the expulsion of Figari, Eguren and nine others, and finally the formal dissolution of the Sodalitium in April this year, just before Francis died. The Sodalitium has accepted its dissolution, asked forgiveness for 'the mistreatment and abuse committed within our community' and for the pain caused the entire church. 'With sorrow and obedience, we accept this decision, specifically approved by Pope Francis, which brings our society to an end,' the group said in an April statement after the decree of dissolution was signed. There was no reply to an email sent to the group with specific questions about Prevost's role. Prevost now a target Leo's record of handling sex abuse cases while he was an Augustinian superior and bishop in Peru has come under renewed scrutiny since his election May 8. 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