It began in the most unlikely of places: with a teenager refusing  to go to school. But over the last three years, a remarkable wave  of climate activism has spread across the globe, inspired by the  Swedish teenage, Greta Thunberg, who caught the imagination  of teenagers around the world, including here in Ireland.

Their ‘climate strike’ gave many older people hope, when it  brought thousands of teenagers out on to the streets of towns  and cities around Ireland, as they demanded a different  ecological future. We know that the Lord often uses the wisdom  and energy of youth to bring about change. Certainly, our young  people are our leaders on this most important issue. The  Government, which admits that it has been slow on the issue of  climate declared a climate emergency in May, 2019 making  Ireland only the second country in the world to do so.

This growing grassroots appetite for change has come at just the  right time. The summer brought no comfort from scientists,  whose investigations continue to suggest the problems we face  are far and more serious than we had thought. Heat and flood  records were broken across the world. The Arctic ice shelf has  melted this year at an alarming rate. Pope Francis’ document on  climate, Laudato Si’ is an illuminating work. The pope’s thinking is  impressive, imaginative, and robust. Francis’s account of the  many factors at play in climate breakdown and the many ways in  which it will devastate lives is evidence-based, intricately argued,  and motivated by a vision that is pro-life in the fullest meaning of  the term. As a Papal encyclical Laudato Si’ is an authoritative text  within the Catholic Social tradition.

In the summer of 2019 Pope Francis met with Greta Thunberg.  He encouraged her to continue her work and assured her that  the climate strikes had his support. Many in the Irish church  recognise that in recent decades there has been a failure to  connect the faith with the younger generations. Yet here, there is  a clear and direct overlap between the mission of the church and  the passion of the young. The Pope sees that care for our world is  not just one more good deed that we might choose to take up,  but is integral to Christian faith. He insists that as ‘we come  together to take charge of this home which has been entrusted  to us,’ we are not responding to some temporarily ‘hot’ topic in  the culture, nor are we motivated by selfish self-interest, because  of the threat we face. Rather, we care for the earth because we  know ‘that all the good which exists here will be taken up on the  Heavenly feasts’.