Before he grew up to be the Academy Awards' perennial near-favorite, baby Leonardo DiCaprio slumbered beneath a reproduction of the "Garden of Earthly Delights" by 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.
"Your Holiness, thank you for granting me this private audience with you," DiCaprio said in Italian, the Associated Press reported , before kissing the pope's ring inside the Apostolic Palace.
"As a child I didn't quite understand what it all meant," DiCaprio told His Holiness, "but through my child's eyes it represented a planet, the utopia we had been given, the overpopulation, excesses, and the third panel we see a blackened sky that represents so much to me of what's going on in the environment."
The encyclical, published last summer, laments "the tragic effects of global environmental deterioration," urging immediate action toward the protection of "our common home."