All the conditions that produced God's creation as we have known it no longer exist. All the conditions that produced human civilization no longer exist. We are facing a crisis of civilization. This anthropogenic climate change has created a climate emergency.

We need a practical theology to help us discern how to live in a climate emergency; we are at a turning point in religious thinking as we try to find a worldview that guides us toward loving the world in crisis and healing it. We need a theology that gives meaning and purpose to young people, a theology that can indicate the way toward the spiritual transformation needed to generate radical hope and intergenerational solidarity.

We must do our best to equip young people to do heroic things. For we know that hope is not taken for granted and must be built. But hope on a distant horizon is still hope. We must go where the pain is, we must go where the wounds are. There we can find healing and reconciliation and we can find a broader consciousness with all the elements at play. We have to find ways to ignite our prophetic and poetic imagination.

Pope Francis' integral ecology is also a source of hope and includes a commitment to the common good, intergenerational equity, and preference for the poor. It provides a dramatic, holistic, and new dimension to traditional Catholic social teaching. It provides a basis for ecology education.

As educators, we can study this tradition, but we must not limit ourselves to it. Learning to act is a perfect opportunity for intergenerational solidarity. Action, hence, is a source of hope. Together with the power of imagination and the profound wisdom of integral ecology, we can build the radical hope needed to imagine a new education.

The full article is available in the WYD 2023 booklet in Italian, English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

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