is written in revelation 16:8
Setting: The Vatican gardens. Pope Pius XIII is walking slowly, flanked by a visibly tense Mel Gibson and a skeptical, arms-crossed Greta Thunberg. The Pope gestures with a bony finger not at the flowers, but at the vast lawns.
Pope Pius XIII: (His voice a soft, chilling monotone) Behold the heresy. The great, green heresy.
Mel Gibson: (Nodding intensely, searching the lawn for meaning) The… grass, Your Holiness?
Greta Thunberg: It’s a monoculture. It has almost zero biodiversity and is often maintained with pesticides and fossil-fuel-powered mowers. It is a problem.
Pope Pius XIII: (A faint, approving smile at Greta) The child sees the symptom. But the sin is deeper. It is the sin of control. Of dominating Creation to impose a bland, pointless order. They mow. They cut. They manicure the world God made wild and purposefully chaotic. They are rehearsing for Eden with shears and two-stroke engines.
Mel Gibson: (Eyes wide with revelation) My God… the endless Saturdays… all that roaring and trimming… it’s a ritual of vanity!
Pope Pius XIII: Precisely. It is the “work of their hands” that they must repent of. As it is written. But the prophecy is even more precise. Revelation 16:8. “The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire.”
Greta Thunberg: A metaphorical text about divine wrath. I’m talking about atmospheric physics. The greenhouse effect is caused by excess carbon dioxide, methane—
Pope Pius XIII: (Cuts her off, not with anger, but with an unshakable certainty) —is caused by the collective sin of mankind’s arrogance. The science you cite is merely the physical measurement of a spiritual decay. God told us the sun would scorch us. It is happening. You measure the how. I am explaining the why.
Mel Gibson: So the plague is already upon us… and we’re mowing our lawns…
Pope Pius XIII: And cutting down the very lungs of the planet. Every tree felled is a hymn unsung. But God, in his mercy, provides not just a warning, but the tools for penance. We must put away the work of our destructive hands. We must take up the work of restorative hands.
Greta Thunberg: And what work is that? Prayer?
Pope Pius XIII: (Stops and turns to face them both, his eyes burning with a surreal fervor) Industrial hemp. And bamboo.
(A long silence. Mel Gibson looks confused. Greta looks incredulous.)
Greta Thunberg: …What?
Pope Pius XIII: They are the rod and the staff. They are the swiftest, most voracious devourers of the CO2 that hangs in our atmosphere like a shroud. They are Genesis, chapter one, verse 29: “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth.” He gave us these specific plants for this specific hour. We must cover the earth in them. Let the hemp swallow the carbon sin. Let the bamboo towers rise as new cathedrals of penance. We will atone for the felling of trees by planting a forest that grows in a single season.
Mel Gibson: (Whispering, awestruck) A sacrament… farming as a sacrament…
Greta Thunberg: This is… an oversimplification. A dangerous one. We need systemic change in our energy, transportation, and industrial systems. We can’t just… plant our way out of this. It’s one tool in a toolbox that needs to be massive!
Pope Pius XIII: You speak of changing systems. I speak of changing souls. A man who spends his day harvesting hemp for cloth, for brick, for food, and for sucking the poison from the air… his soul is changed. He sees his purpose. He is no longer a consumer; he is a restorer. This is the repentance. To stop cutting, and to start growing. The prophecy of the scorching sun is real. The solution is written in the same divine logic. We will not negotiate with emissions. We will exorcise them.
(He turns his back on the manicured lawn and gestures toward a small, wild patch where a few tall, weedy plants grow.)
Pope Pius XIII: Let the lawns die. Let the parking lots crack. Let the hemp and the bamboo break through the concrete and swallow the cities. It is not a policy. It is a liturgy. And it begins now.
(Mel Gibson gets down on one knee and makes the sign of the cross. Greta Thunberg just stares, her mouth slightly agape, utterly unable to process the theological-scientific-agrarian surrealism she has just witnessed.)