Cited for Leadership in Diagnosing the Environmental Crisis as a Spiritual Calling
He Joins Past Laureates Desmond Tutu and Jane Goodall to Receive One of the World’s Largest Individual Lifetime Achievement Awards
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of 300 million Eastern Orthodox Christians, has been awarded the 2025 Templeton Prize for his pioneering efforts to bridge scientific and spiritual understandings of humanity’s relationship with the natural world, bringing together people of different faiths to heed a call for stewardship of creation.
For over 30 years, Bartholomew has articulated a compelling moral and theological vision of humanity’s responsibility to care for the Earth and to uphold harmony, unity, and mutual love within and across religious communities. He has consistently exhorted people of faith to view their relationship to creation as a sacred duty, arguing that making a false historical divide between the material and spiritual can deny the significance of environmental degradation.
“Bartholomew is receiving the Templeton Prize for making care for the environment a central commitment in his role as a spiritual leader,” said Heather Templeton Dill, President of the John Templeton Foundation. “This is harnessing the power of the sciences to expand our collective understanding of humankind’s place and purpose in the world.
“Bartholomew has also deepened Christians’ ideas of what it means to be faithful in the world today. It involves caring for all aspects of God’s creation including the people around us and the natural world in which we live.”
In pursuing this goal, Bartholomew used the stature of his office—the highest spiritual authority within the Eastern Orthodox Church—to convene groups of scientists, scholars, political leaders, and clerics from the Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. Recognizing that science plays a critical role in helping religious leaders accept their responsibility to be good stewards of the Earth, Bartholomew described an “ecumenical imperative.” Care for creation, he argued, is a moral duty that transcends conventional divides between religious, secular, and sectarian perspectives. To that end, he has worked with other leaders to elevate environmental concerns as a means to care for the most vulnerable members of our societies.
“We are not owners of this planet,” said Bartholomew in an interview for the Templeton Prize. “It belongs to the coming generations as well. We are simply stewards and priests of the environment and not proprietors of it.
“Ecology is not a political or economic issue. It is mainly a spiritual and religious issue because God created and gave it to us to protect it, to cultivate it, to use it, but not to abuse it. This is the spiritual dimension of ecology,” he observed.
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ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 