CREATION IN CRISIS! What Can Faith Communities Do?
Prof. Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam SDB, Dean, Faculty of Philosophy, Salesian Pontifical University, Rome & former Coordinator of the “Ecology & Creation” Sector in the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development
The summer drawing to a close in the Northern Hemisphere has been yet another wake-up call for humanity, reminding us that the habitability of Earth, our common home, for human communities and the rest of the biosphere is increasingly under threat. According to the World Meteorological Organization’s August 2026 report, the ten warmest Julys on record have all occurred since 2016, with the past four years (2023–2026) taking the top four spots. North America, Africa and Asia all experienced their warmest summer on record.
The crisis of our common home is now so widespread that it is impossible to ignore. This summer, communities in Asia, home to nearly 60% of the world’s population, experienced unprecedented extreme weather events. Japan and the Republic of Korea experienced exceptional and record-breaking heat in the first week of August, as did other parts of the continent. China, the Philippines and neighbouring countries mobilized their emergency management and response efforts, including mass evacuations, ahead of Typhoon Dolphin’s landfall in the first week of August. Exceptionally heavy rainfall caused flash floods and landslides in north-east and western India, eastern Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
The situation was equally concerning on the other continents. Several areas in West Africa were hit by severe monsoon flooding and heavy rainfall, while the Horn of Africa experienced intense dry conditions. The continent is currently experiencing severe, lingering heat and bracing itself for an intensifying El Niño event, which is expected to be the strongest on record and trigger major floods and droughts starting in autumn. Meanwhile, parts of the Sahel are experiencing seasonal rainfall deficits and the aftermath of record-breaking midsummer heatwaves, while parts of the central and eastern Sahel are experiencing localized flooding from heavy rainfall.
Summer 2026 has been the hottest on record in Western Europe. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union, June and July were the hottest months since temperature records began. Temperatures surged past 40°C in France and Spain, with megafires scorching tens of thousands of hectares and leading to massive evacuations. In Central Europe and the Balkans, all-time temperature records were broken during the first week of August. Severe droughts crippled river levels in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and Croatia (including the Rhine and Danube), forcing nuclear power plants to operate at reduced capacities or build emergency cooling weirs. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom endured repeated heatwaves, with large parts of England experiencing official drought conditions and water-use restrictions.
The Americas were not spared, either. Central and South America experienced a combination of severe El Niño-related marine disturbances in Peru, severe flooding in Brazil and Chile, and prolonged dry periods in parts of Uruguay and Argentina. In the United States, July 2026 was the hottest month on record, with intense heat domes baking the west and east coasts, igniting destructive wildfires and putting a heavy strain on power grids. Meanwhile, Canada experienced contrasting extremes, with severe drought and dry, fire-prone timberlands in the western provinces, and heavy rainfall and flood alerts in the north.
As humanity, we have now reached a critical threshold. After decades of studies and warnings from the scientific community, rounds of global summits, COPs on climate and biodiversity, and waves of political activism and protests across the globe, we have reached a dire and precarious moment. Yet we are not responding seriously enough to the most existential challenge we have ever faced as a human race: the very habitability of our shared planet. The general public and political and economic elites have yet to grasp the gravity of the situation. When it comes to responding to the most existential challenge that humanity has ever faced, there is an appalling vacuum of political and economic leadership. Not only is there passive indifference, but also aggressive resistance. We are increasingly witnessing concerted efforts, especially by political ideologues and economic powerhouses, to dissuade, discredit and roll back meaningful action on climate change and other socio-ecological crises.
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of doing so. The consequences of willful denial and inaction are catching up with us fast, as evidenced by annual and monthly temperature averages that are breaking records, more frequent and intense droughts, floods, hurricanes and wildfires, and the many other alarm signals from the natural world. Yet we remain weighed down by inertia and indifference. New records for global high temperatures are set every few years now. Nevertheless, the topic of the climate crisis has still not reached the top of many people’s agendas. In a recent survey of 32 major countries, respondents collectively rated climate change as the least significant issue when asked to name the most important problems facing their own country. In countries such as France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, concern about climate change ranged from 22 to 25 per cent, never surpassing rank 9. It reached its lowest ranking in the U.S., where only 22 per cent of respondents named it among their top concerns.
What can religions and faith communities do at this stage? I believe they can respond by helping people recover a reverential perception of the natural world as God’s creation. Religions must help their followers to see the Earth as sacred and precious, rather than as a source of raw materials to be extracted and consumed. Ultimately, our mistreatment and abuse of the Earth, and our greedy and excessive consumption of its resources, result from our inability to see the natural world as God’s creation and treat it with the reverence and respect it deserves.
Today, it seems that we have lost our sense of the sacred altogether! A 2023 report by Greenpeace denouncing the mistreatment of ancestors’ graves by the TotalEnergies project, supported by the Ugandan and Tanzanian governments and intended to construct the world’s largest heated crude oil pipeline — the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) — was significantly titled: ‘As if Nothing is Sacred’. The idea of experiencing all things in God, an expression attributed to Saint Isaac the Syrian, seems increasingly alien to us today. We have lost the lofty vision of the natural world as God’s theophany — God’s first and primordial revelation. We no longer read the ‘Book of Works’, as the early Fathers of the Church used to say.
Nothing in the created world is profane because it has the potential to reveal the presence of God. Our generation, it could be said, is characterized by a reductive, willfully close-minded attitude towards the natural world, an inability to see beyond it. Sadly, under the influence of modern secularism and mechanistic science, most religious traditions have lost sight of the fundamental truth of God’s immanent presence in the world. This is despite the fact that this truth lies at the heart of almost all religions and is attested to overwhelmingly in their scriptures and traditions.
The belief in God’s abiding presence in creation is shared by almost all religious traditions. In indigenous traditions, Native Americans believed that wind spirits from the four directions of the world unite all earthly things, and that the wind also connects all things past and present, forming a universal spiritual community. As the Qur’anic verse goes, “Whithersoever you turn, there is the Face of God” (II:115). In the Bhagavad Gītā, Krishna tells Arjuna: “He who sees Me everywhere… sees everything in Me” (6:30). We also read in the Buddhist Avatamsaka Sūtra: “They should not see Buddha in just one thing, one phenomenon, one body, one land, one being—they should see Buddha everywhere.” (Avatamsaka Sūtra, 983) Throughout the centuries, holy men and women have been able to see God in the mirror of his creation. In the Catholic tradition, the example of Saint Francis of Assisi is perhaps the most illuminating in this regard. For the poverello of Assisi, every flower, every bird spoke to him of the Creator, of God. Pope Francis refers to Saint Francis in Laudato Si’:
Saint Francis, faithful to Scripture, invites us to see nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness. “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker” (Wis 13:5); indeed, “his eternal power and divinity have been made known through his works since the creation of the world” (Rom 1:20). For this reason, Francis asked that part of the friary garden always be left untouched, so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there, and those who saw them could raise their minds to God, the Creator of such beauty. (Laudato Si’, 12)
Against a desacralized view of the natural world, a contemplative approach offers a different perception of creation as imbued with divine presence. A contemplative view transforms the world as ‘creation’, impregnated with divine presence, an icon of God’s love. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis recalls Jesus’ own contemplative gaze of the natural world. Francis reminds us that Jesus “was able to invite others to be attentive to the beauty that there is in the world because he himself was in constant touch with nature, lending it an attention full of fondness and wonder.” As Jesus “made his way throughout the land, he often stopped to contemplate the beauty sown by his Father, and invited his disciples to perceive a divine message in things.” (Laudato Si’, 97)
Contemplation is the best antidote to the misuse of our common home. I will conclude with the words of Pope Leo XIV: “Only a contemplative gaze can change our relationship with creation and bring us out of the ecological crisis brought by the breakdown of our relationship with God, with our neighbors and with the earth that is the effect of sin.” (Homily at the Holy Mass for the Care of Creation, Borgo Laudato Si’, Castel Gandolfo, 9 July 2025).
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