Pope Francis says the Catholic Church is contemplating the introduction of “ecological sin” to the compendium of Church teaching.

“We have to introduce, we are thinking about it, in the catechism of the Catholic Church, the sin against ecology, the sin against our common home, be-cause it’s a duty,” he said while speaking to a group of lawyers on November 15.

The Pope’s words came just weeks after the conclusion of a bishops’ summit on the Amazon focused on the environmental threat to the region.

Pope Francis was addressing the 20th world congress of the International Association of Penal Law, held in Rome on November 13-16, under the scope of “Criminal Justice and Corporate Business.” He also said that the culture of waste, combined with other widespread phenomena in welfare societies, is showing the “serious tendency to degenerate into a culture of hatred.”

“It is no coincidence that in these times, emblems and actions typical of Nazism reappear, which, with its persecutions against Jews, gypsies and people of homosexual orientation, represents the negative model par excellence of a culture of waste and hatred,” the Pope said.