Pope Francis delivers his Sunday Angelus Blessing from the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St. Peter's Square on Feb. 16, 2020, in Vatican City, Vatican.

(Franco Origlia/Getty Images)

At a Glance

In a 94-page document entitled "Querida Amazonia," Pope Francis pleads with the world to protect the Amazon rainforest along with the indigenous people who live there.He argues in the piece that the Amazon's indigenous people are the best stewards for the area."Cherished Amazon" nicely complements the Pope’s 2015 papal statement on the environment, Laudato Si.

Pope Francis issued an impassioned plea last week urging the world to save the Amazon from climate disaster, as well as our progressively more fractured world. His call was met with anger and ridicule by Brazil's conservative Catholic president, Jair Bolsonaro.

In a , Pope Francis argues for the ecological importance of the Amazon – the world’s most biodiverse tropical rainforest – carefully describing the area’s ecosystem and weather, as well as the climate change mitigation power that forests have via carbon storage. The pope unequivocally said that the region’s indigenous people are best served to care for and heal it.

Francis addressed it to the whole world, not just Catholics, to emphasize the global responsibility to save the Amazon.

The document comes as the Amazon faces “,” driven by illegal logging, mining and ranching, , in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Brazil, a nation that has also seen a sharp .

Issued on February 12, the Exhortation sparked international backlash, with Brazilian president Bolsonaro snapping back: “Pope Francis said yesterday the Amazon is his, the world’s, everyone’s. Well, the Pope may be Argentinian, but God is Brazilian,” , appealing to his nation’s sovereignty.

Over the weekend, , where he declared that he is a believer in Jesus and that Brazil belongs to God. It is not yet clear if the statement will have any practical ramifications.

The Pope’s “Querida Amazonia” Exhortation, which trasnlates to “Cherished Amazon” is as poetic as it is sharp.

The Pope also specified the importance of environmental justice intertwined with social justice. As he cites, “We do not need an environmentalism ‘that is concerned for the biome but ignores the Amazonian peoples.’”

“I dream of an Amazon region that fights for the rights of the poor, the original peoples and the least of our brothers and sisters, where their voices can be heard and their dignity advanced,” writes Pope Francis, who is known for the social justice lens through which he discusses theology.

His plea in defense of the rainforest is at once scientific, humanistic, political and spiritual: “If the care of people and the care of ecosystems are inseparable, this becomes especially important in places where the forest is not a resource to be exploited; it is a being, or various beings, with which we have to relate,” writes Pope Francis. “When indigenous peoples remain on their land, they themselves care for it best, provided they do not let themselves be taken in by the siren song and self-serving proposals of power groups.”

Throughout the Exhortation, the Pope weaves together a tapestry that tells a story of globalization, greed, displacement, poverty and of memory.

“The Amazon region is a multinational and interconnected whole, a great biome shared by nine countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Surinam, Venezuela and the territory of French Guiana,” the Pope wrote.

South America was colonized and then exploited for its resources. Despite the fact that South American nations gained independence in the last century, “the colonizing interests that have continued to expand – legally and illegally – the timber and mining industries, and have expelled or marginalized the indigenous peoples, the river people and those of African descent,” Pope Francis explained.

The continued exploits for resources pushed many indigenous people from their lands and drove them to the outskirts of cities so they could live. But those moves exacerbated their problems and left many people destitute and struggling.

To the Pope, this epitomizes injustice: “We need to feel outrage, as Moses did, as Jesus did, as God does in the face of injustice.”

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