Citing Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on the environment, leaders of the Catholic church in California spoke out this week to encourage wavering lawmakers to vote in favor of proposed sweeping climate change legislation that is struggling for passage in the final days of this session of the California legislature.

Speaking about SB 350, a bill that would reduce petroleum emissions by 50% in coming years along with restrictions on other kinds of energy use, Bishop Jaime Soto of the Sacramento diocese urged tentative lawmakers “to really think about the future of California and the future of Californians and what is the legacy we want to leave them.

“We are a pioneer state and we are innovators,” Soto said. “And so I would ask them to really consider that and not be hesitant to try to push forward what is essential not only for the good of California but can also set a high mark for other world leaders to follow.”

Their message, delivered inside the capitol building, comes as a direct result of the Pope’s Laudato Si, a 180-page call to action on climate change that suggests a revived emphasis on social and political activism from Catholic leaders.

“We had not really engaged in many of the environmental issues over the course of time, but the encyclical drew the bishops’ attention to say we have to rethink this a little bit and reinvest and figure out where we are,” said Ned Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference, the political policy arm of the church. “The pope is asking for political engagement and we are doing that in California and that is exciting.”

Bishop Steven Blair of Stockton said that the encyclical was a “challenge” to California’s church leaders to “get away from the world of ideas into the reality of where we live … The church wants to be involved, we want to be a voice.”

Soto is head of the California Conference of Bishops, which encompasses about 25 bishops in California’s 12 dioceses, many of which have conservative lay memberships that are at odds with the pope’s call to action. But both he and Bishop Blair have a long history of activism over air quality and pollution, especially in California’s Central Valley, where asthma rates in children are especially high due in part to pollution, and both were supporters of one of California’s first groundbreaking environmental measures, AB 32 in 2006.

Despite that political history, both bishops delineated their role as spiritual leaders rather than policymakers. While Soto said that “almost every Sunday, I try to speak on [the encyclical]”, Blair added that the role of the church was to “lift up the moral perspective”, rather than dictate specific policies.

SB350 is currently waiting for a full vote of the state assembly, but the bill’s author, the senate president pro tem, Kevin de León, is still trying to gather enough votes to ensure its passage. Special interest groups, most notably the oil industry, are staging a multimillion-dollar lobbying and public relations campaign to weaken or defeat the legislation. That effort is particularly targeting moderate Democrats in the assembly. De León is currently working on amendments to SB 350 to gather more support from within his party, and the bill will probably not be voted on until the final days of the legislative session, which ends on 11 September.

Regardless of the outcome, the Catholic leaders promised that they would continue their active participation on the issue.

“The encyclical represents the wake-up call to take a serious look at this to engage,” said Dolejsi. “There is a renewed interest in activism on the part of the church in trying to understand and engage in environmental issues across the country.”