During a spell of thick wildfire smoke this summer, I was driving my kids toward the afternoon sun; it was a pale red, and we could look right at it—only a little brighter than the moon at dusk. I muttered about how I didn’t think I’d experienced this as a kid. One of them said, “Yeah, we know, we have to grow up on a messed-up planet.”
I’m now old enough that I can’t just blame the elders. My generation, too, has failed to confront climate change and its attendant sins. The year after Pope Francis issued his plea for “ecological conversion” toward an “integral ecology,” in the encyclical Laudato Si’, US Catholics helped elect a climate-denier president who pulled the country from the Paris climate accords. As I drove through the dangerous particulate smoke of that climate-exacerbated fire, the denier was president again. Again, his government has tried to unravel every shred of progress toward mitigating climate change and defunded the science that monitors it to boot.
How, I started wondering, will my kids’ generation hold responsible the perpetrators of this crime?
Will there be another Nuremberg, with trials and hangings? Many of these people will be dead before the consequences of their actions are fully realized. Will it be possible to seize from their heirs the trillions of dollars squeezed from fossil fuels and data centers, from politicians’ inaction and from conspiracies of doubt? Perhaps there will be a truth-and-reconciliation commission, on the model of post-Apartheid South Africa, putting out in the open the facts of how so many people had the option to care for our common home but refused. Will they ever bother to repent? Will those who have emitted carbon the least, but suffered most, ever find a way to forgive?
These are not questions to be forestalled until some later date. The conversion Pope Francis called for included, rightly, intergenerational solidarity. We who are alive today must not leave to future generations the work we should be doing now.
Imagine your family lives in a house with a relative who inherited its deed. The relative has fallen into a drug addiction—call it capitalism, if you like—and needs an influx of cash to support the habit. He realizes he can get it by burning down the house and collecting an insurance payment. You start noticing more and more flammable material lying around, along with insurance documents and syringes. He offers to cut you into the deal, right when you’re falling behind on medical payments. What do you do?
He won’t admit to the addiction; he thinks he is being helpful. He is family, so you might not want to call the cops. And you could use the money, too, just like I used a carbon-emitting car to drive my kids through the noxious smoke.
I find myself grasping for stories that might be relevant here. Who among us, in all our little forms of complicity, will cast the first stone? Do we forgive the oil barons and the tech moguls while they burn us alive, for they know not what they do? Maybe we need a council to come together, to persuade and to decide, like the councils that banished ancient heresies or a family intervention for a loved one caught in addiction. But the last time the UN had a climate conference, the US didn’t even show up.
In Laudato Si’, and then in his more frustrated 2023 apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, Pope Francis held out hope for the apparatus of 20th-century international order to act. Those institutions have tried, but there is little they can do when the people lighting the matches will only hear the voice of their drug. Documents and shadow diplomacy have not been enough to produce conversion. The prophesying has to become louder and harder to ignore, while also guiding those on the path of destruction toward repair.
In South Africa, religious institutions did this. They helped orchestrate a process that was liturgical rather than just procedural, and that gave perpetrators a path to reconciliation, not just binary guilt or innocence.
Perhaps it is time for the Catholic Church, in the wake of Pope Francis, to preempt Nuremberg with Cape Town. In a world with a weakened United Nations, with such profoundly frayed trust in modern institutions, this ancient one has a unique kind of voice. We have seen that with Pope Leo XIV, now probably the world’s most important voice on artificial intelligence. The church itself can act, not just ask for action from others.
As the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change collects the scientific truth, perhaps a new inquisition could collect the moral truth. Let the perpetrators defend themselves while they are still alive, if they wish, and let those who are silently suffering from drought and displacement, from death squads and poisoned rivers, have their voices recorded in an institution that has stood for thousands of years. Local dioceses and parishes could do their own, smaller-scale truth commissions. Let the calls for repentance be made harder to drown out, and—perhaps most controversially, as it was in South Africa—may the paths to forgiveness for even the worst climate criminals be open.
As this crisis deepens, and the sun turns red more and more, I suspect those paths will not remain open forever.
In reality, however, all this probably sounds like a joke. The evidence before us suggests, as the kids these days know well, that nothing will be done, nobody will be held accountable, and there is not much justice among the powers and principalities of this world, including the church. This is the story, playing out before us once again, of the cross.