By virtue of its title, Laudate Deum invites us to return to St. Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures and to meditate upon his imitation of “the sensitivity of Jesus before the creatures of his Father,” citing the passage from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in which he encourages us to “consider the lilies” (Mt 6:28-29). Christ is inviting his listeners to cease their worldly worrying and to strive rather for the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Notably, the Kingdom of God is not in opposition to goods of this world, though one ought not seek them in their own right. The only way to achieve them is to welcome them as gifts from God’s generosity, for “these things will be given to you as well” (Mt 6:33). The whole chapter then concludes with the command: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Mt 6:34).
Have tomorrow’s worries finally caught up with us and become today’s? Laudate Deum announces that it is “urgent and necessary” that everyone take “drastic” and “intense” action to avert a climate disaster (§60, §59). In order to remain coherent, it would seem that, for the Catholic, Laudate Deum is doubly challenging: to take drastic and intense action without losing one’s focus on the Kingdom of God or falling prey to the worries of this world at the expense of our trust in God’s loving Providence.
An addendum with serious miscues
Laudate Deum is an addendum to Laudato Si’ and should not be read as a standalone document. Despite its shortcomings, Laudato Si’ contained a true, good, and often beautiful expression of the Catholic doctrine of Creation, building upon the foundation laid down by our previous two pontiffs. Perhaps most helpful and fruitful was its thorough description and critique of the modern technocratic paradigm, which also set in context the flip side of that same evolutionary-materialist coin, namely, the postmodern eco-philosophies. The splendor of the Catholic doctrine of Creation on display in Laudato Si’ answered both of these paradigms with its rich participatory metaphysics and Trinitarian ontology, reenchanting the world and inviting readers to see, like St. Francis, God’s presence in all things and our ontological kinship with the rest of creation as the basis of any sort of environmental concern. It reminded Catholics that their dignity is not in competition with that of other creatures but bolstered by the recognition that everyone and everything remains in existence solely through the generosity of God’s loving self-gift, the radical gift of existence, before which we should all be more reverent and more grateful.
The first fully ecological encyclical came as kind of capstone for a project stretching back four decades with needed improvements over the state the Church was in described by Cardinal Ratzinger in 1981: “the obscuring of the faith in creation, which eventually led to its almost complete disappearance, is closely connected to ‘the spirit of modernity’” (In the Beginning, 82). Indeed, as Aquinas warned centuries earlier, everything – from ethics and politics to our very understanding of God – depends on a proper comprehension of creation, “For error concerning creatures… spills over into false opinion about God, and takes men’s minds away from Him” (SCG II.3). There is no doubt that many Catholics today suffer the effects of the dual modern divorces: between faith and daily life and between the spiritual and natural realms. These are the fruit of the deist notion, spawned by the technocratic paradigm, of a Great Architect god that may have created us, but is not present in the world.
Living in the technocratic paradigm means living as if God were not happening and as if His Existence were of no consequence to our physical lives. Meanwhile, in defiance of this conception of a cold mathematical universe ordered by the laws of physics and random chance, we’ve witnessed a rise in New Age and Neopagan beliefs that reject man’s claim to Baconian dominance over nature, but which fail to find the Creator in the midst of His creation. Laudato Si’ took steps in the right direction but there is still far to go to reinstate the sacramental sense of God’s loving presence working actively in the world, and this will only come about with the restoration of the Catholic doctrine of Creation that Cardinal Ratzinger longed for and strove to bring about throughout his lifetime.
Thus, an addendum to Laudato Si’ was indeed merited and much good could come from continued meditation on the meaning of Creation and discussion of how to dismantle the metaphysical presuppositions of the spirit of modernity which stifle its fruitfulness. For example, additional reflection could come in the form of a more profound appreciation of the meaning of “the new heavens and the new earth” that Isaiah, Peter, and John speak of in Scripture and that Eastern Christianity has explored more thoroughly than we have in the West. Or perhaps such an addendum might have developed a more holistic and Catholic interpretation of the theory of evolution that would reinterpret the observed phenomena as the manifestations of a teleological development, rather than relying on a dualistic notion of “adding” a soul extrinsically to a human body. Or perhaps it might have explored more deeply man’s relationship with technology, providing clear criteria for discernment about its proper use and developing new virtues for resisting its detrimental effects and ever-increasing pervasiveness.
However, the document went in a different direction. It might be the case that Laudate Deum is an incomplete document, only lightly reviewed after coming from committee and rushed into publication in order to meet the deadline of the Feast of St. Francis. This hypothesis is further supported by the roughness of the translation to English. Clearly, there are things that, had they spent more time on, those responsible might have noticed and changed. Here I’d only like to concentrate on three miscues regarding the technocratic paradigm, the reliance on the IPCC, and the notion of “authority.”
1. Technocratic paradigm
Laudate Deum seems to equate “the technocratic paradigm” with dependence on fossil fuels and does not acknowledge that its call for a “green” transition is equally technocratic. Additionally, the statement that “the necessary transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels” (§55) is both puzzling and incomplete, given the fact that wind and solar arrays are dependent on fossil fuels at every step of their production, operation, and even their disposal after their short lives. Fossil fuels are needed to mine the metals, forge the parts, and transport and assemble the arrays. Natural gas operated power plants are needed to power on at a moment’s notice in order to maintain the stability of the grid when the wind dies down or at night. Massive battery stations must be built and electrical grids expanded. And a bulldozer, powered by fossil fuels, will be needed bury the toxic remains of spent solar cells and wind turbines. In fact, the only part of the process that doesn’t require the use of fossil fuels is the “artisanal mining” of rare earth metals in places like the Congo, where slave and child labor extract the cobalt and lithium from the mud with their bare hands. Fossil fuel companies are well aware that wind and solar depend on them and that is why they are developing their own arrays while funding anti-nuclear NGOs that lobby against nuclear energy, by far the most efficient and clean energy source in current use.1
Despite its rhetoric, what Laudate Deum calls for is not a move away from the technocratic paradigm but is rather a lateral move within it towards a new, more aggressive technocracy that will continue to rely on fossil fuels.
There is a much larger problem, however. The technocratic paradigm does not first and foremost refer to using good technology for good ends. Rather it represents a metaphysical outlook on reality that transposes the kind of thinking used in the application of technology to everything – ethics, politics, economics, theology – in a reductionistic and extrinsic way, rather than organically and intrinsically. It instrumentalizes reason for a predetermined pragmatic end rather than making oneself subservient to the Truth that reveals to us our proper ends and that we can know truly though never exhaustively. Thus, it will always look to technology, sociology, and politics to solve its problems.
2. Climate Skepticism
Many readers will wonder about the document’s reliance on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC is the self-proclaimed global authority on “climate change” and the most cited author in Laudate Deum, excluding Pope Francis’ own writings. The IPCC is composed of weather forecasters from the World Meteorological Organization and environmentalists from the United Nations Environment Program. It was mandated from its inception by the United Nations to make assessments of and formulate response strategies to “climate change,” which is defined as “a change of climate, which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere and which is, in addition, to a natural climate variability.” Thus the IPCC is mandated to assume that climate change is happening and that human activity is causing it.
Regardless of this bias, even the IPCC reports are often more balanced and less dramatic than we are told. Early on, the IPCC concluded that, “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” However, under increasing political and financial pressure, the IPCC has published progressively dire predictions anyway, couched in opaque language about the probability of their accuracy. While it is clear that both temperature and atmospheric carbon have increased in recent decades, the fundamental question is: can we actually control the climate through changes in our behaviors? Correlation is not causation and there are untold quantities of assumptions made in order to produce an algorithm that will model the future climate. We do know, however, that though the Covid-lockdowns decreased CO2 emissions in 2020, no change in temperature was measured.
The deeper issues are the particularities of the claims and the very specific demands for political action in Laudate Deum, coupled with scant and cursory responses to possible objections, all of which is quite unusual for an Apostolic Exhortation. The language of “trust the science” has worn thin of late and comes off as coercive rather than convincing. Combine this with the earlier point that wind and solar are anything but clean in their own right and necessarily allied to the use of fossil fuels, and the precautionary principal always points more towards conservation than revolution. More than anything else, it’s a question of spiritual and intellectual humility and our collective responsibility before our inability to know. Catholics cannot decide in advance that we will support any goals until we see what they are and whether they are in accord with teachings on life, human dignity, and creation, nor can we agree to a “common good” until we see that the good is characterized by Truth rather than mere consensus.
3. Coercive Power
Laudate Deum opens by making the claim that human dignity is at stake, and surely there is truth in that: “This is a global social issue and one intimately related to the dignity of human life” (§3). However, the solution is perceived to be “multilateralism for the sake of resolving the real problems of humanity, securing before all else respect for the dignity of persons, in such a way that ethics will prevail over local or contingent interests” (§39). According to §60 however, the UN’s COP28 can “honor and ennoble us as human beings” by creating “binding forms of energy transition that” are “efficient, obligatory and readily monitored.” Few readers will miss the glaring contradiction of “honoring and ennobling” our human dignity by means of the coercive use of power by some kind of multilateralism that has the “authority” to monitor and enforce the energy transition. Coercive power, whether physical or rhetorical, is antithetical to the defense of human dignity because that dignity is founded on our common relation to Truth through reason and the freedom that is the condition of possibility for the ascent to Truth that orients us, communally, toward the Good that is beyond our individual desires, namely the Common Good that is God Himself.
There is little room for doubt about what is being called for: “this presupposes the development of a new procedure for decision-making and legitimizing those decisions” (§43). The suggestion that coercive power will increase the respect for human dignity will come off to most readers as abhorrent, whether that power is exerted by one person, an elite cabal, or “more effective world organizations” (§35). Better attention to detail in the review process should have caught the incongruence between the idea that we need “a multilateralism that is not dependent on changing political conditions… and possesses a stable efficacy” (§35) and the notion that “unless citizens control political power… it will not be possible to control damage to the environment” (§38). In light of the whole, the later appears disingenuous.
More fundamentally, Laudate Deum is rife with a troubling metaphysical conflation of authority and power. True authority compels and commands “from within” through the self-evidence of its goodness. The misapplication of the term “authority” to what is, in reality, coercive force would seem to betray a deeper blindness and a kind of metaphysical despair: the twin belief that Truth is not capable of eliciting willing assent through its self-evidence and, thus, that the Good is not reliably communicable. In this light, the meaning of the curious quotation marks in the (hastily translated) final line of §42 comes into view. While the English reads, “It is a matter of establishing global and effective rules that can permit ‘providing for’ this global safeguarding,” the Spanish actually says, “…that permit ‘securing’ this global protection” (“…que permitan ‘asegurar’ esta tutela mundial”).
Without further clarification, the reader could be forgiven if he or she were led to think that Laudate Deum itself is an exercise in coercive power through rhetorical technique. Power would appear to be an end in itself, and preventing a climate disaster would be a mere excuse and justification for the installation of a new secular world order that annihilates subsidiarity, reduces the Faith to the handmaid of the environmental agenda, and is ultimately incompatible with true Christian freedom.
Conclusion
The most important point made by Laudato Si’ was that the modern world’s entire way of life and form of thinking, even among many believers, is technocratic and based on that deist, mechanistic, utilitarian mindset. This is both a spiritual danger and a physical one that we must overcome in order to find a more harmonious way of drawing our livelihood from the planet. As the phrase goes, we cannot fix the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them. The problem lies not simply on the technological, economic, social, political, or even moral levels, but first in our deepest theological and metaphysical vision, that is, the way we comprehend reality: the world and our place in it, what it means to be a creature, and our relation to our Creator. Ecological and other postmodern philosophies offer a reactionary vision that is, at the end of the day, as D.L. Schindler pointed out, part and parcel of the modern mechanistic and materialistic approach to life that erases God and reduces the transcendent to the merely pragmatic. And so environmentalists must resort to “political action” and put their hope in technology to give them power over people and things.
As the late Stratford Caldecott once explained so prophetically, “many in the environmental movement will try to get their hands on the relevant levers of power and will be increasingly and everlastingly frustrated to discover that all their attempts come to nothing and even make things worse.” The Catholic Church has something more to offer the world than climate activism, the only viable alternative to the myriad errors we see around us: Christ and His Truth – the good news that we are creatures of a loving Father who is closer than we can even imagine. We are creatures that do not find our fulfillment in worldly comforts, but in living out the covenantal relationships we have been born into: with God, with each other, and with the rest of creation.
No one can truly care about an abstract concept like the environment or the climate. We must not forget that we are incarnate creatures for a reason, and we are meant to live as such within our natural limitations. The temptation to do otherwise, to grasp at total control of anything – but especially our own lives – is a temptation away from reality and into the pride of abstraction. The assumption that we can have complete knowledge of our earth’s entire carbon cycle, the Milankovitch cycles, the polar albedo effect, the cycle of atmospheric vapor, and undersea volcanism (just to name a few) is not only preposterous but dangerously presumptuous. (Incidentally, the Muana Loa observatory cited in Laudate Deum has been inaccessible since the end of 2022 due to an unanticipated volcanic eruption.)
In Laudato Si’ we were told, “Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems…. To seek only a technical remedy… is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system” (LS §111). The true and deepest problem of the global system is human sin, and, in the words of Solzhenitsyn, “the line between good and evil… passes through all human hearts.” The solution to human sin, from pollution to the abuses of the powerful that Laudate Deum denounces, will not be solved first and foremost through technology or political action but only through the grace and conversion brought by Christ. Again, “all these things” are added only after first seeking the Kingdom of God.
Sadly, in the light of the above, Laudate Deum appears to be fully imminent and pragmatic, even to the point of instrumentalizing both Scripture and the very critique against the technocratic paradigm served up in Laudato Si’. The irony of Laudate Deum’s repurposing of the “lilies of the field” is inescapable. Christ himself tells us their purpose: to teach us to worry not and to trust in God’s Providence while we allow His Love to transform our lives. However, the reader of Laudate Deum is instructed to worry, and to worry in a life-altering fashion. What this seems to reveal (and why it is so painful to read) is that Laudate Deum is through-and-through a technocratic document that comes on the heels of Laudate Si’ and four decades of good work done to restore the Catholic doctrine of Creation the world so badly needs.
Ignace Lepp once wrote, “Authentic love is always love for a concrete and particular person who answers to a name and who cannot be replaced by another. Even if our love were universal like that of Christ and embraced all mankind, this would not make it impersonal. Pascal was right when he insisted that Christ shed a drop of blood for love of him, Blas Pascal, and not indistinctively for a vague human essence. Is it not true that owing to the fact that many believers have lost the sense of the personal God and have contented themselves with a vaguely deistic spiritualism that the true love of God seems to them a mere pious metaphor and that they do not believe in a grand and authentic human love either?”
It is the same for our relationship with creation also. So let us continue to build communities rooted in the earth and look towards heaven as Christian communities have always done. Let us love and care for everyone and everything around us. Let us resist the centralization of power and seek to be less dependent on the successes of globalism and more dependent on each other, on our local communities, local agriculture, and local economy. Let us be less abstract, less digital, and let us cherish our local places, calling them by their right names. And let us always consider the lilies.
Endnote:
1 There is an additional problem with the expansion of electric grids that such a “green” revolution would require: sulfur hexafluoride. Sulfur hexafluoride is a crucial component of the switchgears that help prevent overloads in electrical grids and, because it is a gas, is constantly leaking into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, it is also a greenhouse gas 23,900 times more potent than carbon dioxide and its atmospheric concentration has doubled in the last 20 years. Another “renewable” energy source is called “biomass” which is code for burning something that was living recently, like a forest, rather than things that were not, like coal or natural gas. There is a reason why this type of “renewable” is rarely talked about.
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Modern man has really backed himself into a corner, in that today’s technological benefits seem to depend on eating our seed corn for tomorrow. After all, anecdotally, the Dustbowl did happen and the glaciers in the Northern hemisphere are doing a disappearing act, whatever the reasons. Including the Himalayan headwaters of the Ganges.
Four incomplete reactions to Dr. Taylor’s rejoinder to Laudato Deum:
FIRST, why is the hasty Laudato Deum’s rush to publication to meet a political deadline still a useful argument, in that in 2015 Laudato Si admittedly was similarly shaped by the decision to hit the streets in time for the Paris Climate Accord? Same cover story after eight years? Might there be a more a more synodal way, shall we say, of drafting a morally based document on highly complex matters? Greater clarity on the intersection between distinct science, moral theology, and ethics?
SECOND, about the science, why is it okay for Cardinal Newman to appeal partly to “convergent probability” regarding personal assent to the faith, but on a larger scale this same argument discredit the incomplete science of climate change? We don’t need another Galileo Moment.
THIRD, the problem of authority and power is glaring. My reading of Laudato Deum was that the “multilateral” language showed at least a marginal effort to move beyond the more centralized proposals in former documents. Needed is an institutional architecture that fully respects both solidarity and subsidiarity (meaning both local and non-governmental entities). This long-term strategy in governance (not government) invites more ink than from a favored theological ghost writer or two.
FOURTH, the burden on the human ecology (!), of the new technologies, is outrageous, e.g., green energy dependence on rare earths and on child-labor and slavery methods of extraction. And about the natural ecology, one of the overarching first laws of ecology remains that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
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Maybe Dr. Taylor should be awarded a late seat at the Synod where climate change is butt one of the “aggregated, compiled and synthesized” agenda items? He could explain his concerns within the allotted two minutes, then to be summarized by “experts” and the “leadership” for bundling into a two-thirds vote with dozens or hundreds of other totally unrelated concerns slated for action.
This Vatican issues political documents. There seems to be little interest in Christ, salvation, eschatology, natural law under God’s creation, the conversion of the entire world under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the sacramental life of the Church as ordered to all of the above.
People read this Vatican very well and the impression is not salubrious.
I think St Paul said it best: “For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teacher and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths.
– 2 Tim 4:3-4
Great article—explains in depth the dangers of thinking we can control everything without our Creator
So, are you saying that we should not try to use solar and wind generated energy and continue to burn fossil fuels at high levels? You seem to advocate mining and burning coal, rather than wind and solar, is that correct? This makes no sense.
You need to reread the article. The claim you make is not there. The only point was the so called green energy and traditional energy sources cannot be set against each other since the former requires the latter. Clearly one can move in the direction of the former but not in opposition to the latter.
Excellent points, thank you
Attaining a right relationship with God and nature becomes increasingly difficult as societies become massively urbanized. Twenty-first Century urbanites view the world in an ever increasingly abstract way. Having little contact with the fundamentals of survival, they fail to comprehend the nitty-gritty of humanity’s daily intense relationship to their fellow creatures and to the Earth itself. Put simply, they often do not lead fully human lives, yet it is their perspective which now overwhelms most of our thinking.
Thank you for this piece. You have highlighted several areas of concern regarding the monolithic focus on fossil fuels to address a poorly understood “problem”. The climate crisis narrative is plagued by over certainty in its analyses and conclusions.
One of the most glaring troubles is the conviction that the proposed technological solutions will not carry their own negative consequences. The toxic byproducts and wastes generated by the “green” industries are staggering. Likewise, the reliability and capacity of proposed solutions are not honestly presented.
There seems to be little or no consideration to the fact that God is controlling the weather!
It’s never about the weather, especially when it’s nice weather, it’s about the “climate”- which can refer to almost anything. When it’s bad weather, then it fits the climate change agenda & we hear about nothing else.
God the Creator controls the weather & climate both. He made them. We’re supposed to be stewards of His Creation.
Weather is local, climate is global. Wheather is short-term, climate is long-term.
And yes, God has given us both, but he has called us to be good stewards of creation – and this involves us caring for climate change.
For a fair and balanced book on climate change I recommend “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters” by Steven E. Koonin. No, he isn’t a “climate change denier”, he served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama, but he also isn’t a shill for the climate change fanatics. Somewhat technical but worth a read.
As Paul is the Apostle, Aristotle is the Philosopher. Aristotle initiated his immense grasp of reality, the created world studying organic life, the lilies, the chameleons and butterflies. From there to the divinity, the first cause of all things. Aquinas, as Taylor notes in his excellent article, deeply indebted to the genius of Aristotle, issued the premise that “from ethics and politics to our very understanding of God – depends on a proper comprehension of creation”. A brilliant premise as well as quote.
Michael Taylor, in that sense identifies the biological essence of the environmental dilemma, the ability to extract components from nature, chemicals [here the astronomically potent greenhouse extract sulfur hexafluoride], blessed and required in context, toxic and deadly when isolated. He makes a great analogy from there to Man’s “vaguely deistic spiritualism” reducing God’s love to a pious metaphor, whereas Blase Pascal adores the drop of blood shed for his person. Henri Bergson criticized positivism, our scientific fragmentation of reality. Truth is lost in the swirl of data.
At this stage of development and human affairs the return to a more agrarian austerity seems out of sight of our reality. Taylor suggests our love for nature and eachother. That coupled with the development of containment, purification technologies are also a good. Above all, our conscious efforts, motivated by love of neighbor to restrain consumption, to reduce misuse of the environment.
Excellent article!
Check the science.
I believe the lilies need CO2 to survive.
Just sayin’
Check the source of the “science of global warming”, the atheist materialist overpopulation alarmist globalist who believe human life is a burden and not a Blessing around the Globe. WHO, WEF, and The UN, all who promote abortion as a solution to “global warming”, and all who want to dictate that which is anti Christ.
We need to respect the environment. This does not mean we accept abortion, but we should be burning less fossil fuels and using green energy.