On Monday, in an unprecedented move, Leo will personally launch Magnifica Humanitas, the product of more than 10 years of Vatican study of AI ethics, the impact on climate, its effect on humans at work and at war, and now the issue that will define the first American pope’s time in office.

Professor Federica Genovese of Oxford, Professor Lorenzo Crippa of Strathclyde, and veteran journalist Dave Vetter joined Richard Delevan to discuss Magnifica Humanitas. Genovese and Crippa discuss their research paper, Papal Dividends, which looked at past encyclicals including Laudato Si: Care for our Common Home released by Pope Francis in 2015 and how they affected the market value of companies in sectors mentioned by the encyclical. The Vatican has worked on AI ethics issues for years, but this will be a defining moment of Leo’s year-old papacy, tying in concerns about the place of humans in the economy and society, the climate impacts of data centres, the use of AI in warfare including current conflicts in Ukraine, Russia, Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran. At a time when the backlash against AI is building, Eric Schmidt and others booed at commencement addresses when mentioning AI, and Peter Thiel going to Rome to accuse anyone trying to slow AI down as ‘the antichrist’, how will Magnifica Humanitas be received?00:00 AI as Defining Issue00:38 Pope Leo’s AI Encyclical02:21 Can Encyclicals Move Markets06:04 Media Backlash and Polarization11:06 Measuring the Market Impact13:46 AI Bubble and Investor Stakes16:11 How Leo XIV Might Land20:28 Legitimacy and Public Trust28:00 Thiel Rome and AI Warfare34:12 What to Watch Next WeekRead Genovese and Crippa’s research, Papal Dividends: https://lorenzo-crippa.github.io/files/papal_dividends.pdf

More than four years after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, like many of her compatriots Svitlana Romanko may have lost faith in the multilateral system.

“ There is no hope in multilateralism, unfortunately, left in the country where I live because as been we’ve been witnessing so far over three and a half years, the international order has been quite outdated and it needs complete renewal,” she told a conference in Rome I attended last October.

Targeted Russian attacks on civilian energy infrastructure, an unambiguous war crime, have been more prominent as they ramped up in an attempt to freeze Ukraine into submission through a bitter winter. More prominent again as experts warn that Europeans need to urgently prepare for Russian hybrid warfare against energy infrastructure across the continent - as a former CIA analyst told Semafor’s Kyiv-based Tim McDonnell:

In late December, a wave of Russian cyberattacks hit energy facilities across Poland, a sign that Moscow may be willing to expand its energy campaign beyond Ukraine as a means of testing NATO cohesion, Chelsea Cederbaum, now a senior threat intelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, said. And as Russian President Vladimir Putin grows frustrated by slow progress in Ukraine and anticipates a post-midterms political landscape in the US that may be less inclined to favorable dealings with Moscow, “there’s a high risk of escalation by Russia over the next two years.”

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But as Romanko recounted to me in our conversation, the four-year conflict has taken an incredible toll on Ukraine’s ability to keep providing energy to its people:

 “In 2021, Ukraine had 54 gigawatts of energy with different types of energy production. And next year we just only have left nine gigawatts. Because everything else was significantly damaged or destroyed by Russian attacks, which were quite hard.

So for households, that meant that we had, uh, power supply, just, it could be two hours per 24 hours.”

She’s clear-eyed about what has kept Vladimir Putin’s war going - something related to the inability of the multilateral international system to stop it: dependence on fossil fuels. As she told me in an interview, the “ global fossil fuel addictions that feeds Purin War machine, but also other war vehicles around the world” are central to the problem.

Another type of faith has kept her going. When Russian troops surged across the border in February 2022, Kyiv-based Romanko was managing the Zero Fossil Fuels Campaign for the Laudato Sì Movement - a global, faith-based coalition founded in 2015 to mobilise Catholics and people of goodwill to tackle the climate emergency and ecological crisis, prompted by the publication of the “Laudato Si: Care for our Common Home” encyclical published by the late Pope Francis that year.

I met Romanko after seeing her speak at their conference in October at the papal summer residence Castel Gandolfo south of Rome marking the 10th anniversary of Laudato Sì. She shared a panel discussion with Tuvalu climate minister Dr. Maina Talia. He also spoke with us:

A professor of climate and environmental law who had already developed deep expertise in the financial flows created by fossil fuels and having worked for several NGOs including 350.org, Romanko was better prepared than most to understand how the war was being funded.

She founded Razom We Stand, a Ukrainian-led climate campaign that aims to pressure the fossil fuel industry to cut ties with Russia, but also calls for accelerated transition to renewables across Europe to lessen the demand for and dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

“ We need to expand on renewables because this is the energy of peace,” she told me. “This is the energies that can’t be targeted by military attacks because it’s very much distributed, it’s owned by many, and it’s very affordable.”

As AFP reported this week from Ukraine, ordinary people in the conflict zone - like people in Pakistan or West Africa - are outpacing policymakers in putting solar and battery to use in adapting to their circumstances. In Ukraine’s case the enemy’s deliberate targeting of the grid. People who might otherwise have to flee their tower block and their city have found ways to keep things going using cheap solar and battery:

The back-up supply in Biletsky’s block meant the lift -- unlike in many buildings -- was still shuttling up and down, and electric pumps were able to send water to the top floors.

Without it, there would be none above the ninth floor, said Biletsky.

“After the inverter was installed, we have constant heating, hot and cold water,” said Tetyana Taran, who lives on the 20th floor.

The inverter is the device that automatically draws supplies from the battery when the mains switch off.

“The fact that I also get to use the lift is great,” the 47-year-old added.

Razom We Stand this week pointed to research suggesting that Europe has, since the February 2022 invasion, spent roughly as much each year on Russian energy as the equivalent of everything Ukraine spends annually on defence (about $44bn). And that, with the replacement of a pipeline that crossed Ukraine with another pipeline via Turkey and into Bulgaria, certain European countries have scaled up Russian energy imports:

Trump administration efforts to force the Europe to replace Russian gas with American LNG are another trap.

“ There is no good gas and bad gas,” she said. “All gas is bad. All fossil gas is bad.”

Romanko sees it as just another aspect that “populist” political movements, whether in the US, Europe, or Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK are acting to try and reverse the move away from fossil fuels. As Desmog revealed in 2024, Reform has been highly dependent on funding from fossil fuel and climate-denial sources.

She is confident, though, that right-wing “populist” successes in preserving the status quo on behalf of fossil fuel allies will be temporary.

“I believe governments will follow because — the populist populism era that we are unfortunately entering in every country where we can see the rise of far rise, it’s very temporary.

They have nothing to offer. They have nothing to really offer to decrease the cost of energy, of electricity to support people.”

By tomorrow morning the voters of Gorton and Denton here in the UK will either make that point and clear - or we’ll have to wait a bit longer.

Repairer of the Breach

A few days ago the first reading at Mass was from Isaiah (58:10-12). While it’s in part about fasting, it struck me it’s about a lot more:

If you lavish your food on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; Then your light shall rise in the darkness, and your gloom shall become like midday;

Then the Lord will guide you always and satisfy your thirst in parched places, will give strength to your bones and you shall be like a watered garden, like a flowing spring whose waters never fail.g

Your people shall rebuild the ancient ruins; the foundations from ages past you shall raise up; “Repairer of the breach,” they shall call you, “Restorer of ruined dwellings.”h

Here’s hoping, for Svitlana and for Ukraine.

Back soon.

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Jane Mellett — theology-trained, climate activist, and professional conscience-pricker — delivered: “It’s really simple, you know. Take what you need, but please stop feckin’ the place up.”

This week Ireland will go to the polls to choose a successor to Michael D. Higgins as its head of state. Whoever she is - and as it happens all of the candidates are women - she will have big shoes to fill. Despite his physical size, Higgins grew to cast a big shadow as president, lending the above-electoral-politics weight to issues like climate change and its deep connection with global poverty, debt, and justice.

With Higgins leaving the scene, some fear Ireland will no longer have the same moral clarity on the subject amongst its political leadership.

As climate policy expert Dr. Cara Augustenborg put it in TheJournal.ie:

Climate change is the elephant in the room and in the race to the Áras.

In past general elections, it featured as a core question in national debates. It has also been a defining pillar of two Irish presidents, with Michael D. Higgins placing climate justice at the heart of his past 14 years as President while Mary Robinson spent those years championing climate action on the world stage.

Against that backdrop, the media’s silence on climate in the 2025 presidential debates is as curious as it is alarming. If climate was central to our previous presidents and general election debates, why isn’t it important enough to ask those seeking the presidency about it now?

That anxiety comes as the country’s head of government, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, recently signalled a retreat from some climate projects, saying, “I don’t think we can mitigate for climate change.”

Martin is hardly an outlier - political leaders who previously challenged each other to go further in their climate ambition have signalled similar retreats.

Canada’s Mark Carney as Bank of England governor pushed Big Finance to play an active climate role in the runup to COP26 in Glasgow. As Canada’s prime minister he’s overturned climate measures and watched with barely a word as the global finance coalition he built disbanded.

The Conservative Party that led the UK government hosting COP26 to much fanfare now says it will repeal all climate commitments and targets.

And on Friday, the US and Saudi Arabia succeeded in preventing the global shipping industry imposing a carbon price to stimulate the move towards Net Zero Fuels. In just a few months, the relatively modest measure went from sure thing to the latest capitulation, as countries - including many threatened with erasure due to climate impacts - switched their votes. Seemingly happier to court long-term destruction than short-term retaliation from an unstable tyrant.

“Climate pragmatism” and “greenhushing” are in, and political leaders see no downside in cheerily ignoring their own warnings from just a couple of years ago about the existential nature of the threat of climate change.

Raising Hope, Stíl Ghaelach

Against that backdrop, and following a message from Pope Leo that seemed to recognise the political climate had changed in directions as worrying as the physical climate, it was interesting to see how people would respond at the “Raising Hope” conference on the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si’ with plenty of reasons for potential despair.

Fortunately, finding the conference with an unexpectedly Irish accent and subversive sense of joy in adversity was itself a source of hope.

A cohort of Celts punching above their weight in climate and spiritual circles is in some ways surprising, in some ways inevitable. So much recent Irish history on climate is a story of missed opportunities to make necessary changes, but that puts the place squarely in the middle of climate action - knowing what’s needed but struggling to get there, and sometimes heading in the wrong direction.

No place I’ve ever spent time managed to feel like the world’s largest small town more than Ireland, and in some ways that makes people who live there better adapted to navigating the weird smallness and intimacy of a global civilisation conscious of its common fate.

Listening to Bishop Martin Hayes of Kilmore, former Green Party leader Eamon Ryan, and Jane Mellett of Trócaire, it’s striking how naturally they inhabit that tension between conviction and humility, big concepts and human-scale action. Hayes, the Irish bishops’ “care for creation” lead, talks about a rewilding initiative that asks the rank and file faithful to see holiness where they might at first see untidiness. Ryan, newly out of electoral politics, muses that climate diplomacy has become less about technology and more about “our sense of ourselves within creation.” And Mellett, who has spent the last six years standing outside Leinster House every Friday, quietly refusing despair, insists that faith still matters — but only if it’s the kind that shows up.

Which isn’t to say that avoids thinking big, or challenging others to do likewise. At this conference before COP30, there was much speculation about the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative - and whether the Vatican and currently observer-status states such as Ireland might come out to endorse it.

What unites them isn’t dogma. It’s the decision to keep at it anyway — to find grace in the slog.

In a country where the Church once expected obedience, these are voices of patient persuasion. Just the quiet confidence that comes from having lived through collapse and still choosing to rebuild. Synodality — that unwieldy Vatican word for “walking together” — suddenly makes sense when you hear Hayes describe it as “a conversation in faith” pointing towards a pragmatic vision of a very different future Church.

That’s not the “pay, pray, obey” Church of old Ireland. That’s a parish hall full of people who might not even agree on God, but who understand that climate, like grace, is a collective act. And that working on it won’t come as a gift from wise and benevolent leaders. It’s up to us. Always has been.

Mentioning Thomas Cahill’s 30-year old “How the Irish Saved Civilization” can bring on an eye-roll and a blush as strong as someone pulling out your teenage diary and high school yearbook. But at moments like this, stories about sheer bloody-mindedness of seeing a way through that is about more than mere selfish survival go down as well as a decent pint of plain.

Post-Script: Climate Martyrs

That the collision between faith and action can sometimes come at a terrible cost. Before travelling to Rome I’d been reading up on Dorothy Stang, an Ohio-born woman who became a nun who chose to work amongst some of the poorest - often with little support and less thanks. She drew attention to the Amazon’s destruction and the indigenous people and small farmers brutally crushed in the process by Brazil’s powerful corporates and landowners - often just done with impunity, whatever the law said.

In 2005 she was travelling to a remote village to oppose a wealthy landowner seizing land to clear for grazing. Two hired gunmen confronted her on the dirt road. Sister Dorothy she took her Bible from her bag and began to read the Beatitudes: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice...

They shot her six times and killed her.

In January 2025 her relics were among those placed at a Sanctuary of New Martyrs at the Basilica of San Bartolomeo in Rome, after the Church recognised her as a martyr. Like other martyrs - Oscar Romero comes to mind - it was easier for people in power to find themselves supportive of her work once she’d been killed, less convenient when she was making people uncomfortable by confronting them with their own failures to stop injustice in life.

Stang was one of a string of names Cardinal Jaime Spengler of Brazil called out while saying Mass at the conference, calling them “climate martyrs”.

So before travelling back to the UK I planned to visit San Bartolomeo on the Saturday. Only to wake up to the realisation that all around us Italy had largely ground to a halt with a general strike and protests against the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the Israeli assault and detention of people on an unarmed flotilla to bring aid to people caught in a man-made famine. Including Greta Thunberg.

Though she has insisted it’s not the important story compared to the injustice and suffering she was drawing attention to, (upsetting content warning beyond the link) reports of her treatment at the hands of Israeli forces after being taken from international waters are harrowing. It’s not a stretch to say that a kind of martyrdom could easily have been the outcome for her.

The contrast between leaders who succumb to the temptation to say things they know not to be true to avoid loss of status and people who put themselves in harm’s way to resist injustice and cruelty could not be more stark.

Most of us live somewhere in between.

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What does it mean to admit that we’ve failed?

We built a whole culture around not doing it. Whether it’s corporate PR or personal pride, we are trained to avoid saying the words I broke my promise. Whole industries exist to soften that truth, to hide it behind phrases like “delays,” “unforeseen circumstances,” or “adjusted targets.” But there are moments when clever words won’t do—when you have to look someone in the eye, someone you promised to take care of, and confess that you didn’t keep your word.

Episode three of Climate Pilgrim began with that question, sitting in the hall of the Raising Hope conference at Castel Gandolfo—the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’. Scientists, theologians, politicians, and activists gathered to talk about faith and the climate crisis, but much of the conversation circled around a single uncomfortable truth: we are on track to exceed 1.5°C. The promise that small island nations fought for at Paris is slipping away.

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And so the question isn’t just what comes next, but how do we live with failure?

In the main Wicked Problems feed we talk to someone with a very different response to the same issue - Laurie Laybourn on his new documentary series - Overshoot: Navigating a World Beyond 1.5°C. (That interview drop is imminent and we’ll update the link to go there directly.)

I’ve spent most of my professional life in communications, often in crisis mode. The textbook advice is always the same: tell the truth, tell it fast, tell it first, tell it all. In practice, almost nobody does. Lawyers warn against admitting liability. CFOs fret about the share price. And so, the system trains us out of candour. When that happens, magical thinking fills the void. Maybe the problem isn’t real. Maybe the numbers are exaggerated. Maybe it’ll blow over.

Saint Augustine understood that impulse sixteen centuries ago. “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet,” he wrote, confessing his own refusal to do the right thing before it was convenient. It’s a deeply human instinct. But it’s not particularly adaptive when you’re watching your neighbour drown.

If you’re from Tuvalu—a collection of low-lying coral atolls in the Pacific—rising seas aren’t a metaphor. Half the country will be flooded at high tide by 2050. By the end of the century, nearly all of it could be gone.

In 2021, Tuvalu’s foreign minister Simon Kofe gave a speech to COP26 standing knee-deep in the ocean. It was meant as a warning, a plea, and a visual confession all at once: we are out of time.

This year, Tuvalu’s climate minister, Dr. Maina Talia, was in Rome, speaking at the conference. When I caught up with him, he corrected some recent headlines about “climate visas”—a scheme with Australia that many interpreted as the first step in evacuating the nation. “Migration is a definite no,” he told me. “It’s a pathway, not a relocation. Home is home. Sovereignty is non-negotiable.”

Then I asked the question that had been bothering me since I arrived:How do we have a conversation, as neighbours, about the broken Paris Agreement promise to try to stay under 1.5°C?

He paused. “In the Pacific,” he said, “if you need anything from your neighbour, you just call out. But in climate negotiations, we forget that spirit. What happens in the global north affects the lives of those in the global south. The moral clarity must stay on the table.”

Moral clarity. It’s a phrase that cuts through the fog of diplomacy. Because behind the graphs and communiqués are human relationships—bonds that are being tested by rising water and broken promises. Tuvalu’s word for neighbour is tu/akoi, meaning “to stand and give love.” Dr. Talia made placing that concept into climate geopolitics and theology the central project of his PhD thesis.

Dr. Talia’s theology of the neighbour insists that climate change isn’t just an economic or scientific issue; it’s a spiritual one. It’s about whether we still recognise one another as neighbours when the cost of doing so becomes inconvenient.

The question “Who is my neighbour?” has been asked before.

It’s the question a clever lawyer throws at Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, trying to narrow the scope of obligation: “Okay, sure, love your neighbour as yourself—but who counts as my neighbour?” And instead of a definition, Jesus gives him a story: the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man is beaten and left for dead on the road. Two respectable citizens pass by. The third, a foreigner from a despised group, stops, binds his wounds, and pays for his recovery. “Which of these three,” Jesus asks, “was the neighbour?” The lawyer answers, “The one who showed mercy.”

Go, says Jesus, and do likewise.

It’s not a story about sentimentality. It’s about crossing boundaries—tribal, national, moral—to help the one you’d least expect to call neighbour.

Some people manage to read the same story and somehow come to confirm their priors — even if it means twisting the story out of any recognisable shape. Earlier this year, JD Vance tried to invoke a “Christian order of love” to justify cutting foreign aid and tightening borders: first family, then community, then country, then the rest of the world. It’s a tidy hierarchy of compassion. It’s seductive because it tells a lot of people exactly what they want to hear - yes it seems harsh or un-Christian but taking care of your own and leaving others to their fate is in fact just fine in Christian terms.

Pope Francis wrote back, in his own way. “Christian love,” he reminded us, “is not a concentric expansion of interest that little by little extends to others. The true order of love is discovered in the parable of the Good Samaritan—love that builds fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Which brings us back to Tuvalu. If the Gospel means anything in the age of climate collapse, it means that the neighbour we’re called to love is already drowning.

When Minister Maina speaks of tu/akoi, he’s talking about something much harder than charity. He’s talking about covenant: the recognition that our fates are bound together. That the emissions from London or Los Angeles or Beijing are already changing the lives of people we will never meet. That moral clarity is not an abstract virtue—it’s an act of bearing witness.

To look someone from Tuvalu in the eye and admit that 1.5°C is slipping away is a kind of confession. Not in a booth, hidden from view, but face to face. It’s the beginning of repentance in the original sense of the word: metanoia—a turning of the heart and mind toward a different way of living.

Maybe that’s why this episode of Climate Pilgrim felt different. Because it isn’t really about Tuvalu alone. It’s about the distance between the promises we make and the neighbours we fail to keep them to. It’s about learning to tell the truth, even when the tide is rising.

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Not eventually — now.

We’re already in the first phase of catastrophe, he tells me, and the only question left is whether we can stop it becoming irreversible and runaway.

For the second episode of Climate Pilgrim, we spoke with Dr. Naidoo at the Raising Hope conference in Rome marking the tenth anniversary of Laudato Si’, we meet the former Greenpeace International and Amnesty International chief, now president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Naidoo’s proposition is as morally direct as it is diplomatically radioactive:

the world must treat further fossil-fuel investment as it once treated landmines, poison gas, and slavery — as something that can no longer be justified.

It took twenty-eight COPs before the words “fossil fuels” appeared in a global climate text. Absurd, he says, but revealing. Because behind the technical language of climate politics lies a communications failure — one that even Arnold Schwarzenegger called out at the same Vatican conference. We’ve drowned people in acronyms instead of stories that make them care about their children’s lungs.

Naidoo was many years ahead of the curve in connecting the dots between human rights and climate justice. “There are no human rights on a dead planet,” he reminds us - an argument that he was one of the first to articulate in quite that way, and which found echoes in landmark climate documents from Laudato Si’ to the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion of earlier this year.

He also sketches the next act: in April 2026 Colombia will host the first diplomatic conference outside the UN system devoted to negotiating the treaty he champions. It echoes how the Landmine Ban Treaty began — not with the biggest powers, but with the most vulnerable.

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Will Pope Leo XIV go to COP 30 in Belém next month — and will he endorse the treaty? Brazil’s climate minister Marina Silva publicly invited him. The crowd in Rome seemed ready to pack the Popemobile themselves. But the deeper question is whether faith communities, armed with Laudato Si’ and Raising Hope, can fill the moral vacuum politics keeps leaving.

Naidoo insists the planet doesn’t need saving; humanity does. Once we’re gone, the forests and oceans will recover just fine. The struggle now is for “our neighbours in vulnerable countries… and for our children and grandchildren who will ask why we failed them when the science was so clear.”

He still calls himself a “prisoner of hope” — echoing Desmond Tutu — but only if that hope is disciplined, urgent, and joined to action. Which makes him a fitting guest for Climate Pilgrim: a series about what happens when faith and climate collide, and what moral imagination might still be possible when the data says we’re out of time.

Intros and Outros

In case you’re wondering if we’ve gone all over-pious, for our theme music we went with Blind Willie Johnson’s God Moves Over the Water, which packs a bit of a punch if you listen to the lyrics:

Then again, if 20 years ago you’d told me an American Pope would lead the Catholic Church as a staunch defender of climate science against a fossil-fuelled global authoritarian reaction led by Donald Trump and a Catholic vice president whose views on Catholicism are so odd he’s been rebuked by two popes in a year, I’d have moved to a different seat on the bus and get off at the next stop.

But here we are.

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This is the first instalment of Climate Pilgrim, our new project under the Wicked Problems banner: an invitation to come with me on a walk through the borderlands of faith, moral imagination, and climate reality.

Wicked Problems started as a public way of asking people a lot smarter than me to help make sense of the tangle of technology, finance, politics, economics and culture that got us into this climate mess and also offers ways through it. Climate Pilgrim will be, I hope, a good-faith effort to explore the deeper questions of meaning and our relationships with each other and our relationships with nature.

Thankfully that week in Rome - sparked by my conversation with Dr. Lorna Gold of the Laudato Si’ Movement - gave us plenty to think about and a head start with a raft of conversations with people I think you’ll want to hear from.

So: episode one. A crossover special. With a sampler of conversations we had in Rome at the Raising Hope conference marking the tenth anniversary of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical on “care for our common home.” Only this time the speaker is his successor – Pope Leo XIV, formerly “Bob from Chicago,” – delivering his first major climate address. And standing beside him on stage? Arnold Schwarzenegger, declaring there are “1.4 billion Catholics out there who can help us terminate pollution.”

The Pope, for his part, was calm – but pointed. Quoting his predecessor, he warned against those who “deride the increasingly 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 the most,” and urged citizens to pressure governments for “rigorous regulations and controls.” It was continuity with Francis, but recognising that we’re 10 years into knowing what we have to do but still failing to do it:

 We must shift from collecting data to caring and from environmental discourse to an ecological conversion that transforms both personal and communal lifestyles. For believers, this conversion is in fact no different to the one that orients us towards the living God.

We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures.

That stayed with me, but I wondered how new or different it sounded to a veteran Vatican-watcher who also could give a sense of how those comments from an American pope went down back in the US. So I asked Colleen Dulle, Vatican correspondent for America Magazine, co-host of the Inside the Vatican podcast, and author of the memoir Struck Down, Not Destroyed, to join me for the kickoff episode. No one alive is better at translating Vatican nuance into plain English – or holding onto faith while reporting on its failings. Our talk ranged from papal climate diplomacy to why New Orleans memes its way through apocalypse, and why a generation raised on scandal might still be searching for meaning.

Colleen reminded me that when Laudato Si’ appeared in 2015, it measurably shifted U.S. Catholics’ views on climate. Two Princeton researchers found that after reading it, American Catholics were more likely to see global warming as real – and as a moral issue. Words from a pope still matter. And Leo XIV, she noted, seems to know that: he switches into English when he wants American media to pay attention.

If he turns up at COP 30 in Belém next month – as Brazil’s Marina Silva urged him to do from the stage, to cheers – expect headlines. He would, after all, be the most senior American on site.

Our conversation also dug into how “structures of sin” – a term the Church uses for systems that have made virtues of selfishness and alienation – mirror the systems driving ecological collapse. The Church now calls the climate crisis and the neglect of the poor two faces of the same failure to love. That moral framing lands differently than talking parts per million or gigatonnes of CO₂. It cuts closer to the bone: business as usual isn’t just unwise. It’s wrong.

Colleen’s own story brings that tension home. She began covering the Vatican during the 2018 abuse crisis – a front-row seat to betrayal – and yet somehow still believes. Her book is about staying on the tightrope: yelling at God one minute, praying the next, and reporting in between. That kind of honest faith feels like what this moment needs – not piety, but persistence.

In Climate Pilgrim we’ll be talking with people of all faiths and none who share that spirit: the ones turning hope from words into work. Future episodes will bring you South Africa’s Kumi Naidoo on the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty; Tuvalu Climate Minister Maina Talia; Bishop Martin Hayes of Kilmore, Ireland on climate obligations as official Catholic social teaching - not a passing fad; Ukraine’s Svitlana Romanko on faith versus fossil-fueled authoritarianism; Ireland’s former environment minister Eamon Ryan on his post-politics climate career; and Graham Sinclair - an LSE-trained Anglican priest breathing new life into church properties to turn around inner cities.

With tons of other conversations that started in Rome and I plan to come back to.

So no, Wicked Problems hasn’t gone holy. We’re just following the story where it leads. And right now it leads through Rome, Belém, and every other place where people are re-examining what they owe each other and the world they pass on as an inheritance. You can call that faith, or politics, or just reality.

PS I did bring home a bottle of the melted Greenland ice Pope Leo blessed – “Pope Juice,” my wife calls it. I keep it on my desk as a reminder that even the most ancient institutions are melting into something new.

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