Full Speech by Cardinal Hummes:

It’s a joy to be together with all of you today.

The Catholic community joins people of all faiths to express our grave concern with “the spiral of self-destruction which currently engulfs us” (LS 163) and to make a strong call for climate justice.

Cardinal Hummes speaks to the crowd, together with leaders from other faiths.

2015 has been a very special year for the Catholic Church and her response to the climate crisis. In June, Pope Francis released his groundbreaking encyclical Laudato Si’, which compellingly framed the environmental crisis as a moral crisis.

In October, my brother Cardinals, Bishops and Patriarchs from the whole world released the “APPEAL TO COP21 NEGOTIATING PARTIES”, calling for a fair, binding and truly transformational climate agreement in Paris.

And in this weekend of November, it is the grassroots of the Church who strongly demand climate justice, under the banner of the Global Catholic Climate Movement.

Today, we bring to Paris the voices of over 800,000 faithful who signed the Catholic Climate Petition.

Families, youth groups, parish communities, lay movements, religious congregations, and Cardinals and Bishops like myself, have mobilized to ask for intergenerational and intragenerational solidarity.

Our ask for world leaders is clear in the petition’s text:

1. We ask for drastic cuts of carbon emissions to keep the global temperature rise
   below the dangerous threshold of 1.5°C. As the Bishops’ Appeal states, we need to “put an end to the fossil fuel era” and “set a goal for complete decarbonisation by 2050”.
2. And we ask wealthier countries to aid the world’s poorest to cope with climate change impacts, by providing robust climate finance.

And tomorrow, we will join the massive Global Climate March in over 2000 cities worldwide, showing our commitment in the streets.

I pray for political leaders to “hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” (LS 49) and to respond to the climate justice demand from faith communities.

Time is running out. Let’s pray and act for Climate Justice!

Thank you very much,