Patriarch Bartholomew and Audrey Azoulay, the director-general of UNESCO, were also present at the meeting, which included a speech by Pope Francis.
The pope encouraged the Lateran academic community to have “an attitude that requires openness, creativity, broader educational offers, but also sacrifice, commitment, transparency and honesty in choices, especially in this difficult time.”
“Let us definitively abandon that ‘it has always been done this way,’” the pope said, calling it a suicidal mentality, which “generates superficiality and answers that are valid only in appearance.”
“Instead, we are called to qualified work, which asks everyone for generosity and gratuitousness to respond to a cultural context whose challenges await concreteness, precision, and the ability to confront,” he said.
“May God fill us with his tenderness and pour out the strength of his love on our path,” he concluded, “‘so that we sow beauty and not pollution and destruction.’”
Francis has sought to galvanize efforts to protect the environment since his election in 2013. He issued the encyclical Laudato si’ in 2015, ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris, which negotiated the Paris Agreement.
He hopes to attend the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26), which begins at the end of October in Scotland.
The Glasgow summit will encourage governments to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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