Since Sunday, June 22, the Catholic faithful have been invited to pray for respect and defense of life, while the law on the end of life is examined in a new reading in the National Assembly. A novena is even offered to the faithful who wish it. This prayer proposal is in line with the discourse of the Catholic Church on the end of life, and there is nothing surprising in the fact that the Catholic Church makes this fight its own.
Today France is experiencing an episode that directly threatens human life: an unprecedented heatwave, during which monthly and absolute records are broken every day, with the day’s record sometimes being broken the next day.
Stress for animal and plant life
The heatwave of 2003 caused 15,000 deaths, that of 2026 is worse. Daytime and nighttime temperatures directly endanger human life. They represent a threat to the health of the elderly or the chronically ill, the same people for whom we are called to pray regarding the law on the end of life.
The heatwave also weighs on Creation, inflicting severe stress on animal and plant life, with direct consequences on agricultural cycles, and therefore on the capacity of the soil to feed France.
However, regarding this direct threat to life, official or media Catholic voices are absent. The front page of the Conference of Bishops website does not mention any press release. The situation is not commented on, there is no word of support for the population who suffer while trying to cope as best they can with temperatures for which the human body is not made.
Social and ecological dimensions
The doctrine of the Church is very clear, and Pope Leo
France and Europe are suffocating under the heat, heatwaves caused by global warming kill tens of thousands of people each year in Europe. In France alone, an Oxfam study estimated that heat kills more than 5,000 people each year.
The contrast between episcopal commitment to bioethical questions and the absence of commitment from the same episcopal body to ecological threats – as indeed to social threats – against health and human life can only be of concern. The causes of global warming are known, as are those of the sixth mass extinction, which also threatens human life.
“Moralizing sect”
At the start of the Covid-19 epidemic, in March 2020, Catholic authorities offered novenas for the sick and caregivers. Where are the prayers for the victims of the heatwave? Where are the novenas for the conversion of hearts and ways of life and for the adoption of a way of life that truly fights against ecological collapse? Where are the novenas for farmers whose crops are roasting?
It is not isolated and one-off commitments from a few bishops that we need, it is a collective awareness of the climate trajectory we are on. If we do nothing to combat the causes of global warming and build a more robust way of life and habitat in the face of the upheavals caused by global warming, the heatwave under which we are suffocating will appear in ten years to be an almost cool episode.
Faced with these dangers, where is the Conference of Bishops of France? What does she fear from speaking out commensurate with the seriousness of the situation? To use an expression that left its mark after the publication of the Sauvé report, if the Church of France collectively persists in a double standard depending on whether the threat to human life concerns bioethics or social and ecological justice, it risks becoming a “moralizing sect” that no one will listen to anymore. And it won’t be undeserved.
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