On March 5, Cardinal Peter Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and head of the committee helping draft Pope Francis’s encyclical on ecology, gave a lecture that many see as a possible preview of the encyclical.

Cardinal Turkson noted that the encyclical release date (June or July) is in part an attempt by Pope Francis to shape the deliberations leading up to the UN’s global climate treaty negotiations in December. Brian Roewe of the National Catholic Reporter explains that Cardinal Turkson outlined four themes of the pope’s teachings on integral ecology:

Source: Catholic Climate Covenant