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Author: Donald Wright, Professor of Political Science, University of New Brunswick
Original article: https://theconversation.com/laudato-si-a-look-back-on-pope-franciss-environmental-legacy-255604
The Vatican’s College of Cardinals will soon gather in Rome to elect a new head of the Catholic Church following the death of Pope Francis.
As the church prepares for the papal conclave, the world is assessing Francis’s legacy and his stance on the role of women in the church, LGBTQ+ rights and the needs of migrants and refugees.
However, every assessment should include a discussion of Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, his 2015 encyclical on climate change.
In many ways, it’s a remarkable document. At once rational and urgent, it calls on all of us — “every person living on this planet” — to think about what we are doing to the only planet we have.
Read more:
Three ways Pope Francis influenced the global climate movement
Our common home, Francis wrote, “is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us.” And yet, we “have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.”
The end result? Runaway climate change in the form of higher temperatures, extreme weather events and biodiversity loss. In this sense, reading Laudato Si’ — “Praise be to you” in Italian — is like reading an assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Unlike the IPCC report, however, Francis didn’t pull his punches. “The Earth, our home,” he wrote, “is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”
Francis didn’t hold back
A few months after the publication of Laudato Si’, the world gathered in Paris to draft a new climate treaty. It too is a remarkable document. However, if the authors of the Paris Agreement couldn’t mention the economic roots of the climate crisis – they couldn’t even use the term fossil fuels — the pope could and did.
Francis relentlessly called out our “models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment,” our “irrational confidence in progress and human abilities” and our “blind confidence in technical solutions.”
He was critical of “current models of production and consumption” and our faith in “the invisible forces of the market,” as well as our “misguided anthropocentrism” and our “throwaway culture.”
Francis pointed a finger at obstructionism and denial. He worried about the rise of social media, which has led to disconnection from each other and from nature. And he was critical of “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth.”
Although terribly “attractive to economists, financiers, and experts in technology,” it’s a fantasy based on the lie “that there is an infinite supply of the Earth’s goods.” There isn’t, and the planet is “being squeezed dry beyond every limit.”
Using ironic quotation marks, he even criticized “green” rhetoric, so fashionable in eco-capitalist circles.
It wasn’t the first time Francis talked about a global economy that doesn’t work. A few years earlier, in 2012, he caused a minor fit in some circles with the publication of Evangelli Gaudium. Wealth moves up, not down, he argued, while the poor are excluded and grow in number.
The late American pundit Rush Limbaugh called it “pure Marxism.” Undeterred, Francis went further in Laudato Si’ when he linked the climate crisis to an economy premised on constant consumption.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a Catholic convert and at the time a presidential aspirant, told him to stick to his knitting: “I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinal or my pope.”
Laudato Si’ and abortion
Of course, Francis had stuck to his knitting in one important way: on at least four separate occasions in Laudato Si’, he singled out abortion — or, in his words, “eliminating children” — as part of the climate problem. He wrote:
“Thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.”
No, it doesn’t. Moreover, empowering women through access to birth control and abortion care is part of the solution to poverty in both the Global South and the Global North, something Francis cared deeply about, like his namesake St. Francis of Assisi.
Read more:
Francis − a pope who cared deeply for the poor and opened up the Catholic Church
In 2023, Francis published Laudate Deum, a short followup to Laudato Si’. At the same time as he urged the world to act, he condemned those who blame climate change on the poor for having so many children and who “attempt to resolve the problem by mutilating women in less developed countries.”
According to one Catholic news and information site, this was an apparent reference “to campaigns in favour of contraception and abortion regularly conducted by the West.”
Centuries of pro-life absolutism in the Catholic Church meant that Francis couldn’t make the connection between women’s lack of bodily autonomy and poverty, and between reproductive justice and climate justice, and, in part, the idea that climate change disproportionately impacts women.
Still, Laudato Si’ invites all of us to connect the dots between growth, consumption, poverty and climate breakdown. One doesn’t need to be Catholic, or even religious, to read Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change for what it is: a powerful and deeply moral reminder that the climate is not something separate from us.
To quote Francis, it’s a “common good” that belongs to all of us.
Donald Wright does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.