VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis took receipt of an all-electric popemobile today, as part of the Vatican’s wider campaign to have a fully electric fleet of vehicles by 2030.
In a reception by the Paul VI Audience Hall today, Pope Francis was handed the keys to his new Mercedes-Benz popemobile. The German car manufacturer has a longstanding relationship of nearly 100 years in supplying the Holy See with vehicles.
Francis’ new vehicle was billed by the company as the first fully electric popemobile made by them. A previously anticipated such popemobile promised by Fisker was never actualized.
NEW: #PopeFrancis took receipt of an all electric pope-mobile from Mercedes this afternoon.
For over a year, the #Vatican has been building its new fleet of electric vehicles and charging ports around the City State, citing need to tackle emissions. pic.twitter.com/PvawJXZ0HO
— Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 (@MLJHaynes) December 4, 2024
The vehicle, stated Mercedes, has been highly modified as expected and was designed in close collaboration with officials at the Vatican. Its features include heated seat and handrails and platforms for members of the Swiss Guard to stand on when the vehicle is in motion. A detachable partial roof is also featured.
But while every popemobile features a plethora of fine details designed to interest both the manufacturer and car enthusiasts, Mercedes’ new creation is notable for its fully electric nature.
“This means that the Pope will be traveling locally emission-free in a new Mercedes-Benz in time for the 2025 Jubilee,” a press release stated.
The vehicle, designed for specifically low speeds in order to drive around a crowded St. Peter’s Square, “contributes to the realisation of the encyclical ‘Laudato Si’” wrote Mercedes. “In it, Pope Francis describes the need for sustainable development.”
Praising the new vehicle, Ola Källenius – chairman of Merecedes Board of Management – stated that “we are also sending out a clear call for electromobility and decarbonisation. Mercedes-Benz not only stands for the special and individual – but also for consistently creating the conditions for a net-carbon-neutral new car fleet in 2039.” The company expanded by saying that “net-carbon neutral” means that “carbon emissions that are not avoided or reduced at Mercedes-Benz are compensated for by certified offsetting projects.”
The new vehicle comes as part of a wider project throughout the Vatican City State to implement “green” polices in line with Pope Francis’ ecological writings – particularly Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum.
In November 2023, the Vatican announced it had signed a deal with Volkswagen Audi Group in order to replace the state-owned cars with electric vehicles and thus “make its car fleet zero-impact by 2030.”
To facilitate this, the Vatican has been installing electric charging ports across its territory – both in the city state and in extraterritorial property – working to “ensure that its energy needs come exclusively from renewable energy sources.”
The Vatican’s “sustainable mobility development program,” known as “Ecological Conversion 2030,” features other elements in its pursuit of “climate neutrality.” Its electric car replacement plan “represents one of the steps the Governorate has taken to enable a concrete reduction in the impact of human activity on the environment,” the Vatican announced last November.
Charging ports have indeed been installed across the Vatican City State, while the Vatican’s gas station is still also in operation.
Francis has made ecological issues a central theme of his 11-year pontificate, going so far as to sign the Holy See onto the pro-abortion 2015 Paris Climate Accord (also known as the Paris Agreement). The Pope defended the controversial move, saying that “she [‘Mother Earth’] weeps and implores us to put an end to our abuses and to her destruction.”
Francis also previously called on nations to move away from fossil fuels, urging the 2023 COP28 summit to “institute a rapid and equitable transition to end the era of fossil fuel.”
READ: Pope Francis calls for an ‘end’ to ‘the era of fossil fuel’ in Prayer for Creation message
Writing his second ecological keynote text last year – the apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum – Francis requested “obligatory” measures across the globe to address the issue of “climate change.”
NEW @NorahODonnell @CBSNews intvw clip.#PopeFrancis says re climate change “we have got to a point of no return. It’s sad, but that’s what it is. Global warming is a serious problem.
Climate change at this moment is a road to death. A road to death, eh?” pic.twitter.com/Mlb3XeNEXD— Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 (@MLJHaynes) May 21, 2024
“It is no longer possible to doubt the human – ‘anthropic’ – origin of climate change,” the Pontiff wrote before later calling for mandatory alignment with “green” policies:
If there is sincere interest in making COP28 a historic event that honors and ennobles us as human beings, then one can only hope for binding forms of energy transition that meet three conditions: that they be efficient, obligatory and readily monitored.
Such actions have disregarded long-standing and repeated concerns from pro-life and family advocates, who continually warned about the climate activism movement’s alignment with pro-abortion and population control advocates and lobby groups.
The Pontiff’s statements have also been disputed by scientists and activist outside the pro-life field. The UAE’s Dr. Sultan Al-Jaber, the COP28 president, rejected the argument that fossil fuels need to be eradicated in order to achieve the Paris Accord’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5C. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” he stated last year.
Lord Peter Lilley, a life peer in the U.K. House of Lords and former MP, also revealed that he previously discovered there were no studies accepted by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that predicted “the extinction of humanity if the world takes no action to phase out fossil fuels.”
Nor, he added, was there “a serious threat of humankind being reduced to poverty, hunger and wretchedness if we don’t reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.”
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, Dr. John Clauser has also disputed the rhetoric bolstering the calls to remove fossil fuel usage. At a conference last year, Clauser said that “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis,” and accused the IPCC of promoting misinformation.