Pope Francis presents care for the earth as care for our common home, addressing all humanity through scientific, ethical, and spiritual dialogue. Drawing on Saint Francis of Assisi, earlier papal teaching, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, he links pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and ecosystem damage with poverty, exclusion, forced migration, and ecological debt. The poor and future generations bear the heaviest burdens, requiring renewable energy, protection of habitats, international solidarity, and limits on technological and economic power.

Human beings are stewards rather than owners of creation: dominion entails cultivating the earth, respecting its limits, protecting human dignity, and securing the poor’s share in its fruits. Francis rejects both faith in technology alone and contempt for humanity, identifying the technocratic paradigm, practical relativism, consumerism, and concentrated power as sources of the crisis. Integral ecology joins environmental protection to dignified work, ethical biotechnology, Indigenous participation, sound housing and urban planning, and the common good. Governments and businesses must accept responsibility through transparent impact assessments, precautionary action, regulation, and international cooperation. Conversion also requires education, family and civic responsibility, simplicity, gratitude, Sunday rest, and contemplative Christian spirituality. The Trinity, Eucharist, Mary, and Saint Joseph ground a hopeful fraternity with creation, expressed in faith, joy, and prayer for the wounded world.