The Pope Blessed a Block of Ice While Speaking About Climate Change, but Why?

There was quite a bit of hubbub when the first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church was named, but Pope Leo XIV has also made a name for himself by speaking out on a wide range of political and spiritual issues. During a global church summit on climate change, the pope appeared to bless a block of ice.

This somewhat confusing gesture has some people bewildered, but also has some people furious at the ritual and its implications. Here's what we know about the pope blessing some ice.

Leo was presiding over the 10th anniversary celebration of his immediate predecessor Pope Francis's landmark ecological encyclical Laudato Si, or Praised Be. The event was a signal that Leo plans to continue advocating on behalf of environmental action, and he even made explicit calls for action, according to the BBC.

"Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming, and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most," he said. "God will ask us if we have cultivated and cared for the world that he created for the benefit of all and for future generations, and if we have taken care of our brothers and sisters — what will be our answer, my dear friends?"

Of course, Catholic priests and bishops have often blessed water, so it's really not that odd to imagine them also blessing water in its solid form. Some, though, seemed to suggest that the ritual was somehow sacriligious, which is hard to get your head around since the pope was the one doing it. Of course, the pope was pretty explicit in calling out enemies of climate reform, which may have read to some as a rebuke of the Republican Party.

"Horrific. The whole thing," influential conservative personality Matt Walsh wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter). "Pope Leo blesses a block of ice and then stands there while these communist freaks do some kind of weird pagan Earth worshipping hippy ritual. The leader of the Catholic Church shouldn’t be anywhere near this nonsense. What the hell are we doing here.”

Father Federico Palma, a traditionalist Catholic priest, also went after the blessing. “The Vatican II religion touched a new low," he wrote. "Leo XIV in one week did perhaps more damage to the Catholic Faith than Francis in a couple of years. First, he undermines the pro-life cause; secondly, he promotes ecumenism and religious indifferentism, and now he performs this truly esoteric ‘blessing’ of water. What a disgrace.”

Pope Leo clearly seems to be a reform-minded pope, and while Catholicism is inherently a fairly conservative religion, he seems to be pushing its boundaries and offending some people along the way. Blessing the ice was just one way for those who were upset to express that outrage.