His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has been named the Templeton Prize Laureate for 2025. On April 10, 2025, the John Templeton Foundation, in collaboration with the Templeton World Charity Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust, announced that the Ecumenical Patriarch was this year’s recipient of the Templeton Prize, which “honors individuals whose exemplary achievements advance Sir John Templeton’s philanthropic vision: harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.” The Ecumenical Patriarch will receive this prestigious international award in New York City in September 2025.
The Templeton Prize announcement states that “His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is the spiritual leader of 300 million Eastern Orthodox Christians whose pioneering efforts to bridge scientific and spiritual understandings of humanity’s relationship with the natural world have brought together people of different faiths to heed a call for stewardship of creation.”
The announcement adds that “using the stature of his office—the highest spiritual authority within the Eastern Orthodox church,” Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew “has convened groups of scientists, scholars, political leaders, and clerics from the Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. His ‘ecumenical imperative’ to care for creation recognizes that science plays a critical role in helping religious leaders accept their responsibility to be good stewards of the Earth. In 1997, he made history by declaring that acts harming the environment—such as pollution, deforestation, and climate change—are not just practical missteps but moral failings. This pastoral teaching introduced a new category of sin—‘ecological sin’—which has since influenced both religious and secular discourse on environmental ethics.”
The John Templeton Foundation also points out that “His All-Holiness is well known for groundbreaking engagements in environmental, interreligious, and peace-building efforts around the world. These include his Religion, Science and Environment Symposia held from the Amazon River to the Arctic Sea, his numerous Ecumenical and Interfaith initiatives within all the Abrahamic Traditions and beyond, and his forthright and courageous stand for the sovereignty, integrity and peace of Ukraine.”
On receiving the Templeton Prize, His All-Holiness stated: “We gratefully and humbly accept this unique recognition, which reflects the philanthropic vision of Sir John Templeton, the exceptional founder of a worldwide enterprise of investment in the human spirit and in the ability for the human person to perceive and harness the capacities of the Spirit. This honor is not only to our humble person, but to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Apostolic See of Saint Andrew the First-Called Disciple. For seventeen centuries, this Church of Saints and Martyrs, Confessors and Theologians, has led the spiritual mission of teaching and preaching the transformational Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ throughout the oikoumene. We accept this singular dignity in the name of this history of service to God and the human family.”
The Templeton Prize organizers also released a video of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, in which he states: “I am a child of the island of Imbros. I grew up in this natural environment, beauty, green, flowers. Everything is well organized by the good God. And while we say that we respect and love God, we destroyed what he created. Destroying nature is a sin. In Greek, we use the word metanoia, change mentality, correct ourselves to save our common home. It is a sacred goal.”
Previous recipients of the Templeton Prize have included Mother Teresa; Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama; Archbishop Desmond Tutu; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; King Abdullah of Jordan; renowned ecologist Jane Goodall; and leading scientists and peacemakers across the globe.
