“I had such high hopes for Pope Leo until he decided to bless a block of ice at the Vatican’s ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’ event,” @LarryDJonesJr complained to more than 176,000 followers on X.
“Horrific. The whole thing,” Matt Walsh groused to his X audience of 3.9 million. “The leader of the Catholic Church shouldn’t be anywhere near this nonsense.”
The social media commentators were responding to Pope Leo XIV’s memorable water blessing at the Raising Hope for Climate Justice conference, which convened at Castel Gandolfo on Oct. 1, joining a number of social media commentators who briefly took up digital arms against Pope Leo following the ice blessing.
The event was sponsored by the Laudato Si’ Movement, a global campaign to mobilize Catholics to respond to the church’s call for care of creation. Raising Hope celebrated the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’ groundbreaking “Laudato Si’,” the encyclical that detailed the responsibility of Catholics to respond to the global climate crisis and reach a deeper understanding of integral ecology.
The presence of holy water in every Catholic church in the country did not discourage peddlers of online outrage from claiming that blessing water in its solid state amounted to “a pagan drift” and a distortion of Catholic worship by the pope. Some objected to the alignment of Catholic teaching with what they described as a political agenda for combating climate change and global warming, a phenomenon conclusively shown to have been exacerbated by human activity.
Lorna Gold, the director of the Laudato Si’ Movement, explained that the social media reaction took Pope Leo’s blessing of the ice, which included water from all the continents, out of context.
The moment of the blessing “was created to highlight the voices of those most affected by the ecological crisis,” Ms. Gold said in an email to America. “We had water from every continent…. As water in the Arctic is usually ice, it was blessed in melting ice form.”
The block of ice was cut from a shrinking glacial sheet in Greenland. At the end of the three-day event, the melted water from the glacial ice was “mixed with water from rivers across the world” brought by international representatives, according to a press release from the Laudato Si’ Movement. Participants were able to take bowls of the blessed water back to their home countries.
“This was not just a gift, but a sign of the urgency of the climate crisis, marked by the hope carried through the Pope’s blessing,” the press release continued.
In his address to the conference, Pope Leo firmly aligned himself and the church with Pope Francis’ environmental legacy. He said, “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.”
The negative posts on social media surprised Ms. Gold. “From our perspective, we were simply asking the pope to bless water from every continent. Nothing more.” She described the moment as “uniquely symbolic” and said that she “could feel an audible gasp from the audience when the pope silently put his hand on the ice and paused,” reflecting instant awareness of how special the pontiff’s solemn acknowledgment was.
“What could be more Christian, Catholic?” Ms. Gold wrote. “The pope blessed water, just as John the Baptist did. Just as saints and scholars have done through history. In our times, given the tragedy of the ecological crisis, this took on a new meaning, but it is an ancient tradition. The Holy Spirit makes all things new.”
The angry reaction among some members of the Catholic commentariat was, according to Ms. Gold, “almost exclusively an American online phenomenon.”
But the fact that outside the United States commentators and media were more welcoming of the moment, she added, “does not mean all is well with regards to public consensus on tackling climate in those countries.”
She said Catholics around the world need to move past political spats and toward real action on the climate. “The personalized nature of the reaction in the U.S. seems to be pointed at the pope,” Ms. Gold said, “[but] many Catholics across the world remain skeptical or disinterested in relation to climate change.”
That resistance suggests that Catholics worried about the impact of climate change still have a lot of work ahead of them, she said.
The work of the Laudato Si’ Movement will continue in preparation for COP30 in Brazil, the United Nations’ 30th annual conference dedicated to climate action. In a press release, Ms. Gold said that the water blessed by the pope will be present at the U.N. event in November.
COP30 will convene in the face of the Trump administration’s systematic assault on efforts to address climate change, including the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the cancellation of a number of federally backed clean energy programs. The Trump administration also plans to rescind the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding”; that could lead to a rollback of power-plant emissions standards. The administration argues that its actions are aimed at restoring energy independence, reducing regulatory burdens and prioritizing economic growth over what it considers burdensome climate mandates.
Ms. Gold hopes that the pope’s witness will galvanize world leaders to pursue much-needed action. “Climate policies are significantly off track even as we witness extreme weather events on a daily basis,” she said. “We hope that seeing the pope bless a melting iceberg may pique interest. It certainly made for a great story.”
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