RELIGIOUS organisations tend to operate slowly and ponderously, while environmental politics, and sometimes the environment itself, move more rapidly. The Vatican had intended to release Pope Francis's long-planned encyclical on climate change in a carefully choreographed event on the morning of June 18th, but a version of it, apparently pretty close to the final one, was leaked to the world by L'Espresso, an Italian magazine, four days early.

The document's release is still a dramatic event. By throwing his personal authority behind the global effort to mitigate climate change, the pope has made a significant intervention in world affairs. From the secular world's perspective, this is probably the most important step he has made during his two-year papacy.

Pope Francis has offered what many were waiting for: an unequivocal statement that climate change is happening, is man-made, and must be tackled by humanity's combined efforts. He writes: "There is a very consistent scientific consensus which indicates that we are in the presence of a disturbing warming-up of the [global] climatic system. In the last few decades, this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in sea-levels; and it is difficult not to posit some relationship with the increase [in the frequency of] extreme meteorological events..." In an apparent small sop to climate-change sceptics, he allows that some other factors, from volcanic eruptions to changes in the earth's axis, might be at work. But he insists that "many scientific studies" have identified human activity, and the resulting concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, as the main factor.

Compared with many previous encyclicals—the highest level of elaborate religious teaching which a pope can issue—the tone of the remaining 190 or so pages is accessible and short on theological technicality. Philosophers like Thomas Aquinas are cited, but the encyclical is a more readable document, and more immediately palatable to non-Christian, non-theological readers, than I predicted last week.

As well as Catholic sources and the Judeo-Christian scriptures, the document makes repeated reference to the environmental ideas of Patriarch Bartholomew I, the Orthodox leader who has pioneered green theology, as well as the thinking of non-Christian religions and secular ideas about the planet. But it also offers a new and different tone, one that carefully avoids extremism. Most Christian eco-theology leans in one of three directions, either emphasising the effects of environmental degradation on humans, especially poor ones; or the divinely created status of nature and the duty to protect God's work. Sometimes, eco-theology places a secular-leftist stress on environmental harm as something indivisible from the issues of poverty and global inequality.

All those motifs surface in the document, but they are expressed with comparative restraint. Much of the writing might have come from a secular environmental NGO writing a briefing paper ahead of the summit in Paris at the end of this year which will mark a new attempt to strike a global bargain to restrain carbon emissions. As any such NGO would, the papal document repeatedly asserts that it behoves rich countries who have already grown rich from fossil fuels to help undeveloped poor ones. But it acknowledges that terrible inequalities exist within "poor" countries, so the problem is not merely one of north-south equity.

The voices of the more left-leaning parts of the Vatican bureaucracy can be heard in passages which denounce "green-wash" and token efforts at corporate social responsibility, and express scepticism about carbon trading. But compared with some of the pope's previous denunciations of the cult of money or the alleged link between capitalism and war, this document is quite cautious in tone.

Traditional American church-goers, who loved Pope Benedict, won't like the encyclical; some secular greens, and perhaps some religious ones, will complain that it doesn't go far enough. Secular campaigners for the planet will certainly argue that it is dishonest to exclude population control from any assessment of humanity's collective footprint. But the pope has spoken in his own, populist and universalist voice, one that seeks to reach out beyond the boundaries of Catholicism and often succeeds.Here

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