Pope Leo’s Ice Blessing Counters Climate Doubts After UNGA Remarks

Vatican, 2 October, 2025: Pope Leo, history’s first American pope, has drawn global attention after performing an unusual symbolic act: blessing a large block of ice at a climate event near Rome. The move, interpreted as a pointed stand against climate change denial, came just days after Donald Trump called global warming a “con job” at the UN General Assembly (UNGA).

During the tenth-anniversary celebration of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Leo stood before a massive piece of glacier ice from Greenland and performed the blessing. “We will raise hope by demanding that leaders act with courage, not delay,” he declared. He then turned to the audience, asking: “Will you join with us?”

The event gathered about 1,000 representatives from environmental and Indigenous groups, with actor and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger also in attendance.

In his remarks, Pope Leo strongly criticised sceptics who “ridicule those who speak of global warming,” while affirming his commitment to Pope Francis’s ecological legacy and extending it in his own way. He urged participants to pressure governments into adopting stronger measures to address the damage already caused by climate change.

The pontiff also expressed his hope that the upcoming UN climate conference “will listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor.” He presided over the gathering on a stage that featured a melting glacier as a stark reminder of environmental urgency.

Quoting Pope Francis’s 2023 follow-up encyclical, Leo recalled that world leaders had often “deride the evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most.”

Calling for a deeper spiritual commitment, he stressed that genuine Christian faith must include care for creation: “We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures. Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded,” he said, surrounded by the melting ice and tropical ferns on stage.

Pope Leo has also endorsed a Vatican project to transform farmland north of Rome into a large solar energy site. When completed, the installation is expected to make Vatican City the world’s first carbon-neutral state.

The pope’s actions on climate change have drawn criticism, especially in light of Trump’s recent remarks at the UNGA, where the former U.S. president dismissed the issue entirely. “The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions, and they're heading down a path of total destruction,” Trump had said.

Source: The Guardian