Pope Francis on Sunday said he was late to his weekly Angelus prayer by 7 minutes because he was trapped in a Vatican elevator and had to be freed when firemen came to his aid.
“I have to apologise for being late. I was trapped in a lift for 25 minutes, there was a power outage but then the firemen came,” the smiling 82-year old pontiff told the people in St. Peter’s Square.
Pope Francis said a “drop in tension” caused the elevator to stop operation but said the fighters rescued him luckily.
Also on Sunday, Pope Francis challenged governments to take “drastic measures” to combat global warming and reduce the use of fossil fuels, saying the world was experiencing a climate emergency.
The Pope and leader of the world’s 1.3 billon Roman Catholics also seized the medium to issue his appeal, a written message for Sunday’s World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, ahead of the United Nations Climate Action Summit this month in New York, a follow up to the 2016 Paris Agreement to curb global warming.
“There, governments will have the responsibility of showing the political will to take drastic measures to achieve as quickly as possible zero net greenhouse gas emissions and to limit the average increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius with respect to pre-industrial levels, in accordance with the Paris Agreement goals.”
“We have caused a climate emergency that gravely threatens nature and life itself, including our own,” the leader of the world’s 1.3 billon Roman Catholics said in the message for the prayer day, which is marked by various Christian Churches.
