Pope Francis was probably a marketing guru in his former life. Even when events do their utmost to conspire against him, he somehow manages to produce a touch Midas would have found hard to match.

When the Pope’s eagerly-awaited encyclical on climate change and the environment was leaked to the media some days before it was due to be published, many people thought that burglars had managed to make off with much of Francis’s thunder. They could not have been more wrong.

The Vatican’s response may have been to ban the publication that broke a gentleman’s agreement over an embargo, but the Pope had much bigger fish to fry than that. He went for the ruling classes’ jugular, launching a missile that was also a sound bite creator’s dream.

“Humans are turning the earth into an immense pile of filth,” he said. But Francis didn’t stop there. He also stirred a hornet’s nest among high-flying politicians – Republican US President candidate Jeb Bush perhaps chief among them – by making an unequivocal statement on climate change, calling it a “global problem with grave implications”. For Catholics who have failed to acknowledge the issue even exits, this presents a bit of a problem.

Granted, the Pope’s message is not entirely new. But what is new, and refreshing, is the language and methods he’s using to communicate it. It’s shorn of ambiguity and loaded with direct, pungent statements that were reinforced by a veritable Vatican avalanche on Twitter.

Yet this is one message that did not get lost in the fanfare or its 192 pages of carefully thought-out reasoning. The over­riding message is simple and has resonance with all of us: “We have come to see ourselves as (the Earth’s) lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.”

It would be tempting to say that it is a happy coincidence that a statement like the one above was issued to the world at the very time that Malta is seeing a revival – on a person not institutional level – of its environmental conscience. But it is actually no coincidence at all. The air we breathe, the land we walk upon, the sea we depend on for nourishment and survival, are very real issues we confront every day.

This is an issue that transcends religion, however welcome it may be to have someone of the Pope’s stature entering the fray, and it should be one that also transcends politics. In Malta, that may prove to be a difficult task, especially if the accusations levelled at Archbishop Charles Scicluna – who has nailed his environmental colours to his mast – are anything to go by.

Loving one’s country does not have a political colour; nor does a fight against mindless greed. Unfortunately there are people in Malta, as well as around the world, who are intent on plundering what they can – as quickly as they can – to become rich or richer. And the problem is that we have a government that is encouraging them.

That is precisely why a group of individuals felt the need to set up the new pressure group Front Ħarsien ODZ, and precisely why so many people decided to give up their leisure time on a summery Saturday morning to line the streets of Valletta to protest at what is happening.

The government will ignore this growing movement at its peril. But much more important than that is for people to ignore the peril of their country being ruined by lords and masters who think they have the right to plunder. They have no such right.

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