Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, POPE FRANCIS has been the Pope of the Catholic Church since March 13, 2013, when he became the 266th pontiff. He is the first Latin American and the first Jesuit to lead the Roman Catholic Church—and the first non-European leader of the church in 1,200 years. He took the name Francis after St. Francis of Assisi. Born in Buenos Aires in 1936 to Italian immigrant parents, Pope Francis was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1969. He became a bishop in 1992 and the Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, and, in 2001, was appointed as a cardinal by Pope John Paul II. Devoted to rectifying social injustices and economic inequality, Pope Francis has said that he “would like to see a church that is poor and is for the poor.”

NAOMI ORESKES is Professor of the History of Scence and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Her opinion pieces have been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Nature, Science, and other leading publications. She is the author of a number of books, including Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, co-authored with Erik M. Conway. In May 2014, she attended “Sustainable Nature, Sustainable Humanity,” a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that helped to lay the foundations for Pope Francis’s Encyclical.