A timely exhortation shining light on three crucial realities of our age

The 2015 release of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ surprised and often disappointed a good many who had been anticipating a papal document devoted to climate change.

Laudato Si’, it turned out, was something more. Offering only several paragraphs to the issue—along with rebukes of the secular environmental movement, with its often anti-human mentalities—the encyclical gave a comprehensive overview of multiple, often related ecological and social issues, all in the context of a Catholic understanding of faith and the fallen human person. While prudential matters were examined and political solutions offered, the ultimate answer at the heart of Laudato Si’ was humanity’s right relationship with each other, with creation, and with the Triune God.

With the release today of a less formal apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum (“Praise God”), a decisive statement by the Successor of Saint Peter about climate change has been given, but once again, this document—while titled and focused “on the Climate Crisis”—is something more.

Exhortations, critiques, and hope

The urgency running through Laudato Si’ to address ecological issues is certainly amplified in this latest offering by Pope Francis. Addressing Laudate Deum to his “brothers and sisters of our suffering planet,” the Holy Father offers this latest document as something of an addendum to his 2015 encyclical.

“[W]ith the passage of time,” the pontiff writes, “I have realized that our responses [to ecological issues, especially climate change] have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point. In addition to this possibility, it is indubitable that the impact of climate change will increasingly prejudice the lives and families of many persons.” [Laudate Deum 2]

Francis’s critique of the world’s response to climate change provides some of the bluntest language that one may find in the corpus of papal social teachings. In particular, he is more than a little frustrated with those who simply dismiss the topic—whether that the climate is changing at all or that such changes are due to human contributions of greenhouse gases.

“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident,” Pope Francis writes in the exhortation’s opening paragraphs. [5]

He adds that “[i]n recent years, some have chosen to deride these facts. They bring up allegedly solid scientific data, like the fact that the planet has always had, and will have, periods of cooling and warming. They forget to mention another relevant datum: that what we are presently experiencing is an unusual acceleration of warming, at such a speed that it will take only one generation—not centuries or millennia—in order to verify it.” [6]

The Holy Father’s impatience continues:

In order to ridicule those who speak of global warming, it is pointed out that intermittent periods of extreme cold regularly occur. One fails to mention that this and other extraordinary symptoms are nothing but diverse alternative expressions of the same cause: the global imbalance that is provoking the warming of the planet. [7]

Francis responds with a primer on climate science. He references in particular the matter of global carbon dioxide gas levels as measured by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory, which elsewhere offers this telling video graphic of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels for close to the past million years—the upshot being that those levels have certainly and routinely fluctuated between roughly 185 parts per million (ppm) to just under 300 ppm, but the value has skyrocketed to just over 420 ppm in the past century, with the burning of fossil fuels offering the only justifiable explanation as to why. (This recent spike in heat-trapping CO2 is a major concern for climate scientists and activists, and many Catholics—such as Pope Francis and his two immediate predecessors—because of the definitive impacts of a warmer atmosphere. These impacts include warmer oceans and the setup for stronger, wetter storms dumping record-breaking amounts of rain in brief periods of time, to name just two.)

It should be noted that Francis does strive for balance, such as with his acknowledgement that “[c]ertain apocalyptic diagnoses may well appear scarcely reasonable or insufficiently grounded.” [17]

And in bringing the voice of the Church to the world’s climate deliberations, he rejects so-called solutions that run counter to the dignity of human life—in one case offering a pointed chastisement of those who “attempt to resolve the problem by mutilating women in less developed countries.” [9]

Moreover, as Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI had often expressed in their ecological writings, the primary critique and rebukes within Laudate Deum are with failed international responses to the causes and impacts of environmental and climatological issues.

These failures, Francis stresses, are rooted in the breakdown of multilateral politics and, more importantly, in the prevalence of a wider, technological worldview in which “[e]verything that exists ceases to be a gift for which we should be thankful, esteem and cherish, and instead becomes a slave, prey to any whim of the human mind and its capacities.” [22]

Francis nonetheless finds hope in an arena in which he often does: among human relationships and interconnectedness.

Quoting from his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (All Brothers), Francis applauds the “many groups and organizations within civil society [which] help to compensate for the shortcomings of the international community, its lack of coordination in complex situations, and its lack of attention to fundamental human rights.” [37]

Indeed, there has been a growing activity and influence of civil society—especially among the young, including Catholic youth—since the issuance of Laudato Si’ in response to ecological issues. As Francis sees it, all this is an example of the benefit of the principle of subsidiarity, and it is to be applauded. “In the medium-term,” he writes, “globalization favours spontaneous cultural interchanges, greater mutual knowledge and processes of integration of peoples, which end up provoking a multilateralism ‘from below’ and not simply one determined by the elites of power.” [38]

Francis is, after all, a pastor from the Global South. He is a champion of new voices engaging—“not … replacing,” he says in Laudate Deum—the politics of centuries past. He recognizes and continually expresses confidence in how dynamic voices, especially from places such as Africa and South America, “are becoming increasingly relevant and are in fact capable of obtaining important results in the resolution of concrete problems.” [40]

This optimism serves as a prelude in Laudate Deum to an exasperated critique of past annual meetings of the UN Climate Change Conference, which seek to advance the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement and the 1994 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Looking forward, Francis’s optimism allows him to forge ahead in hope for concrete actions to be taken at next month’s Climate Change Conference, or Conference of Parties (COP28), to be held in the United Arab Emirates, such as “binding forms of energy transition …[and] that they be efficient, obligatory and readily monitored.” [59]

“A Growing Technocratic Paradigm” and the spiritual solution

What precedes this discussion on international politics, however, should be read as the heart of Laudate Deum.

Referring to a similar discussion in Laudato Si’, Francis identifies the cause of so many of our ecological ills: a prevalent technocratic worldview that has as its goal the “increase [in] human power beyond anything imaginable, before which nonhuman reality is a mere resource at its disposal.” [22]

Here it is helpful to note that the idea of power which Pope Francis refers to comes to us largely by way of another Francis, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who saw in the scientific revolution his notion of ipsa scientia potestas est—“knowledge itself is power.”

Dr. Deborah Savage, Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville and a contributor to these pages, put it this way in a 2014 interview with Catholic Ecology: “Bacon’s premise is that the purpose of knowledge is to gain control over nature so that we can do what we want with it. We can make it do what we want. … [which leads to] a strange kind of rationalism that says that truth is discovered prior to any kind of contact with reality. … what you really know are only the contents of your own mind.”

It is this “strange kind of rationalism,” this desire to gain control over nature above all else, that Pope Francis rejects, rebukes, and seeks to replace by returning the light of faith to us descendants of the Age of Reason. Quoting from Laudato Si’ (139), Francis writes in Laudate Deum,

[c]ontrary to this technocratic paradigm, we say that the world that surrounds us is not an object of exploitation, unbridled use and unlimited ambition. Nor can we claim that nature is a mere “setting” in which we develop our lives and our projects. For “we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it,” and thus “we [do] not look at the world from without but from within.”

This itself excludes the idea that the human being is extraneous, a foreign element capable only of harming the environment. Human beings must be recognized as a part of nature. Human life, intelligence and freedom are elements of the nature that enriches our planet, part of its internal workings and its equilibrium.

For this reason, a healthy ecology is also the result of interaction between human beings and the environment… [25-27]

One need only read the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis to find the grounding for the Holy Father’s understanding of this “healthy ecology,” which requires humanity to again see itself as intimately connected with—and responsible for—the goodness and order of creation. With the light of divine revelation, Francis exhorts us to ask, “What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of my time on this earth? And what is the ultimate meaning of all my work and effort?” [33]

Laudate Deum closes with what is perhaps some of Francis’s most inspired examinations of our current state of affairs—social, personal, international, and ecological. In the final section on “Spiritual Motivations,” the pontiff handily places ecological protection—including the matter of climate change—within the Christian life, authentically lived, whether one is in charge of a single home and family, a small business or a multinational corporation, or the ruler of a nation.

“The world sings of an infinite Love,” Francis writes, exhorting “how can we fail to care for it?” [65]

The reception and what’s next

While the future of our planet’s climate and ecosystems may not be certain, one thing is: The release of Laudate Deum will be celebrated loudly in some corners of the Church and derided just as loudly in others, predictably along existing partisan, ideological fault lines.

Critics of the apostolic exhortation may cry foul at a concluding recognition of the United States per capita emissions of greenhouse gases but not the total emissions of nations such as China. Or they may wonder at Francis’s self-referential style, which rarely if at all acknowledges similar documents issued by his predecessors. Or one may simply disregard the matter of climate change altogether.

But in the end, Pope Francis has provided the faithful, the lapsed, and all people everywhere a timely exhortation that shines a light on three crucial realities of our age: the natural sciences are clear that the widespread burning of fossil fuels—which have helped individuals and economies in innumerable ways—comes at a cost, which includes alternating our planet’s climatological and ecological systems, and not for the better; that a worldview rooted in knowledge as power and disconnected from faith can instill within individuals, businesses, and nations a particularly unhelpful appetite for whatever we can take from and throw back into the natural order, again at a cost; and that the solution to all this lies in plain sight—in our faith’s certainty that grace and nature, when freely joined together, can bring about those vital, right relations with the Triune God, with creation, and hopefully with each other.