The Game-Changer in the Vatican: Thoughts on Pope Francis and His Laudato Sii
       by Joseph Prabhu, Professor of Philosophy (California State University, Los Angeles)

When Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was elected Pope by the College of Cardinals in March 2013, and chose the name of Francis in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, the choice of name was significant. It was the first time that the name was chosen in the history of the papacy and signaled both a message and a personal style to go along with it. Like the 13 C. Umbrian saint, Pope Francis was pointing to an engagement with the world rooted in a love for both the created world and those whom the human world marginalizes, those whom Franz Fanon once called the “wretched of the earth.” In a simile that he later used, Francis wanted the Church to be like a field-hospital tending to society’s outcastes and also to the wounds inflicted by humanity on the earth, a church of and for the poor. The matching manner that went along with that message was one of simplicity, candor, straight-forwardness and humility. Like his Umbrian predecessor, Francis was indicating that the Church exists to serve the world and its needs and not to succumb to the all-too-common temptations of worldly power and materialism cloaked in “spiritual” guise. And while he did not don the rags of the poverello, Francis eschewed the grandeur of the Papal palace and chose a modest suite of rooms in a Vatican guest-house, the Casa Santa Marta, and dresses in a simple white cassock adorned by a pectoral cross.
The first full-fledged text in which Pope Francis articulated his vision for the Church came in November 2013 , his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium,(The Joy of the Gospel), in which he clarified the mission of evangelization in the contemporary context. While that text was written in the form of a pastoral letter addressed primarily to the 1.2 billion members of the Roman Catholic church, it nonetheless touched on many of the themes that are spelled out more fully in the recent encyclical –the concern for the poor, the obligation to establish just and sustainable social and political orders, the priority of the common good over individual self-interest, and the imperative to see societal wealth more in terms of rich and relational human lives, rather than in monetary terms. With his penchant for straight talk, Francis questioned the priorities of a world where it is not considered newsworthy that an elderly homeless person dies on the streets, but it is a prominent news item when the Dow Jones average loses two points. Evangelii Gaudium, primarily addressed the need for ecclesial reform and renewal that would better equip the Church to fulfil a radical change of priorities and the tasks associated with them— in the words of St. Francis to “preach the Gospel ; use words, if necessary.”
Laudato Si dated May 24, 2015, the Feast of Pentecost in most Christian churches, and officially published on June 18, has been much anticipated for more than a year. It was well known that Pope Francis consulted widely with an array of thinkers and activists, spanning environmental scientists, economists, theologians, philosophers, policy-makers, and advocates for change. The document reflects that broad scope and multi-disciplinary and multi-level focus. Nonetheless, it is not an academic treatise but a pastoral appeal addressed not just to Christians but to all people, reflecting both the universal nature of the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves, and the need for a universal response at different levels,–political, social and personal,–to the crisis. This is manifested in the subtitle of the encyclical “On Care for our Common Home.” It is an urgent call addressed to humanity at large for changes in outlook, consciousness, practices and lifestyle. Needless to say, a document as ambitious and as deliberately pondered as this one merits careful study and thoughtful response. Francis clearly feels that this is a watershed moment in human evolution and has issued a summons to pay heed and to change our ways.
This brief essay represents just a few preliminary reflections evoked by a quick first reading of the text. There are several noteworthy features of the encyclical which I shall comment on, before engaging with a few issues at somewhat greater length.
First, an encyclical in contrast to, say, an exhortation or a pastoral letter signifies the highest level of teaching in the Catholic Church and becomes part of the official social teaching of the Church. The rigorous preparation for and the wide consultation point to the fact that these are not just the personal views of the Pope, but views from a broad spectrum of opinion, much of which is cited in the endnotes. A whole team of experts was brought together under the able leadership of Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, the President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace which produced a first draft, which then went through many revisions. Never the less, it is the Pope’s vision and spirit that permeate the text. He goes to great lengths to acknowledge candidly that it is neither possible nor desirable to get a complete consensus on these matters, and indeed invites further reflection, dialogue and discussion. The encyclical is now an official statement of the Church.
Second, this is the first encyclical in the history of the Church that addresses the environment, and to my mind it ranks up there with Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII in 1891, which dealt with the rights of labor and capital in the modern economic system, and Pacem in Terris of Pope John XXIII in 1963, which concerned itself with the arms race and nuclear non-proliferation in particular. Mention should also be made of the powerful encyclical Evangelium Vitae ( The Gospel of Life ) issued by Pope John Paul II in 1995, which in many ways is a precursor to Laudato Si. When historians write the history of Catholic social teaching I wager that Laudato Si will be seen as one of the most significant encyclicals of modern times, a profound statement dealing with fundamental questions of the purpose and destiny of creation and of humans within it. Leonardo Boff, one of the grandfathers of Latin American liberation theology has dubbed it “The Magna Carta of Integral Ecology.”
Third, for all its profundity, it is written in a simple, direct and warmly appealing style, reflecting the desire of Francis for it to be widely read, studied and discussed. While the personal popularity of this Pope might initially draw people, perhaps out of curiosity, to the text, its literary craft and sincerity, not to mention the importance of its subject matter might well induce a wide readership to go further and read it through. In the short period of time since its publication (this is being written on July 6), it has already evoked much discussion. Indeed this very volume, edited by one of the most renowned and prominent eco-theologians of our time, Prof. John B. Cobb Jr., is further testimony to its importance
Fourth, while it engages with many pressing scientific, political, ethical and economic issues, Laudato Si is primarily a spiritual and devotional text. It begins with the famous Canticle of the Creatures of St Francis, Laudato si, mi’ Signore, (“Praise be to you, my Lord) and ends with a long prayer, which concludes the lines:

O lord, seize us with your power and lighthelp us to protect all life,
to prepare for a better future
for the coming of your Kingdom
of justice, peace, love and beauty.
Praise be to you!
Amen

Indeed, part of its literary skill is that it is able to enfold scientific, moral and political arguments within a theological and devotional context, signaling that for Francis, theological talk about God is inextricably and necessarily linked with reflection on human destiny and the fate of the earth. I see it as a text within the Franciscan devotional tradition translating St. Francis’s robust and challenging spirituality to our times. All too often, St. Francis is presented in art and in popular representations as a sentimental, innocuous figure who preached to the birds, and swooned over the sun and the moon. What is overlooked, and what Pope Francis picks up, is how counter-cultural his espousal of poverty was and how in our own day the “poor in spirit” might better be able to hear the cries of the earth than those intoxicated by the “technological paradigm” and dreams of material progress.
Fifth, it is a significantly ecumenical document, drawing on a wide range of wisdom, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, and also on deliberations in conferences in many parts of the world. The Pope makes special mention of the greatly respected Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Orthodox Church, one of the most respected religious voices on the environment (see Paragraph 7). It is also noteworthy that the three people invited to officially launch the encyclical on June 18 were the above-mentioned Cardinal Peter Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for justice and Peace, the Orthodox Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon, one of the outstanding environmental theologians of our day, and Professor John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change. Already in Buenos Aires, Francis was well-known for his close ecumenical ties with Rabbi Abraham Skorka and Imam Omar Abboud. Recognizing the global nature of the eco-crisis, the Pope here reaches out to all people, religious and secular.
Sixth, in spite of the ecumenical and multicultural references in the encyclical it is important to remember that Francis, as an Argentinian, is the first Pope from the Americas. And indeed this is a very Latin American document marked by the style and temper of Latin American liberation theology. Not only are there ample references to at least three important conferences of Latin American Bishops in Medellin (1968), Puebla (1979) and Aparecida (2007), there is a characteristic liberationist methodology adopted in the encyclical which I might summarize as : observe, analyze, listen deeply to the cries both of the earth and the poor, and then act for freedom and dignity. This is reflected in the composition of the text. Chapters one and three are respectively entitled, “What is Happening to our Common Home” and “The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis”; chapters two and four address “The Gospel of Creation,” and “Integral Ecology”; and, finally, chapters five and six speak to “Lines of Approach and Action” and “Ecological Education and Spirituality.”
Having commented on some broad features of the encyclical I want to make two slightly more extended remarks, the first theological, and the second political-economic.
In an influential article in 1967 entitled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” the historian Lynn White Jr. laid the blame for our environmental crisis largely on Christianity with its account of creation and anthropocentric world-view both of which legitimize human insensitivity and indifference to the natural world and our consequent exploitation of nature. But precisely because the roots of the crisis are religious in nature, the solution must also be “essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.” He concludes his essay thus: “We must rethink and re-feel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose (St.) Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.”
Some 50 years later, Pope Francis has heeded Lynn White’s call for an “alternative Christian view” along Franciscan lines that might ground and empower a healthy natural and social ecology. He writes early in the encyclical: “I do not want to write this encyclical without turning to that attractive and compelling figure, whose name I took as my guide and inspiration when I was elected Bishop of Rome. I believe Saint Francis is the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically. He is the patron saint of all who study and work in the area of ecology …He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society and interior peace.” (Paragraph 10)
In his exegesis of the two creation accounts Francis is at pains to show they have been incorrectly interpreted to imply dominion over the earth and nature. He emphasizes the injunction in Genesis 2.15 where we are enjoined to “Till and keep the earth,” where “tilling” refers to cultivating and ploughing, while “keeping” implies caring, preserving and sustaining. And he then concludes this biblical reflection with the words:” peace, justice and the preservation of creation are three absolutely interconnected themes, which cannot be separated and treated individually without once again falling into reductionism. Everything is related…”
Francis then buttresses this integral ecology with what I might call an integral theology. What we call the Divine cannot be separated from the human and the cosmic, or else we fall into the dualisms of the divine and the human, and the human and the natural which theologically speaking are precisely what have enabled the ecological crisis. But while the Divine, the Human and the Cosmic should not be separated, it is not entirely clear how they should be related. Traditional Christian theology has usually seen the Divine as ontologically preeminent and to the extent that humans are created in his or her image, some of that ontological preeminence rubs off on humans, which in turn leads to the human domination of nature. Metaphors of “care” and “stewardship” still carry an anthropocentric charge and however much such anthropocentrism might be tamed in asking us to care to “till and keep the earth,” we have not yet moved to a truly “integral theology”
A more promising candidate for such an “integral theology” is the cosmotheandric vision of Raimon Panikkar where the Divine , the Human and the Cosmic exist in co-constitutive relationality and have no individual and independent ontological status. As Panikkar puts it: “There is no matter without spirit and no spirit without matter, no World without Man, no God without the universe etc. God, Man and World are three artificially substantivized forms of the three primordial adjectives which describe Reality.”
Allied with that theological weakness in Laudato Si is a related cosmological inadequacy. The modern form of homo sapiens emerged in the last 200,000 years. Human history has to be placed within the 14 billion years of the universe’s and the 4.5 billion years of the earth’s existence. Modern industrial civilization is a mere two hundred or so years old, and yet has managed to destroy in that short interval many of the life forms and much of the bio-diversity built up over the life span of the universe. Metaphors of “care” and “stewardship” acquire context and depth, and are themselves questioned, when placed within the histories of the earth and the universe. The account of the interplay between human and evolutionary history provided by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in The Universe Story, and the “deep history” of homo sapiens given by Yuval Harari in Sapiens, to provide just two examples of what is becoming a fast-growing field, allow us to see and to understand more vividly our human place in nature and our belonging to it. This body of important research is relatively neglected in Laudato Si, an understandable omission given its already sizable length , but nevertheless research which might call into question both our anthropocentric tendencies and our hyper-present imaginations, fueled by technologies that speed up time and constrict space.
While I am not an unqualified admirer of the Pope’s theology, I am, however, a strong supporter of his notion of integral ecology. “We urgently need a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of knowledge, including economics, in the service of a more integral and integrating vision. Today, the analysis of environmental problems cannot be separated from the analysis of human, family, work related and urban contexts, nor from how individuals relate to themselves, which leads in turn to how they relate to others and to the environment.” There is a tendency at times to see the environmental crisis as a largely scientific-technological one having to do with reliance on different forms of energy, and questions of poverty and inequalities of power and wealth, by contrast, as a largely socio-political crisis. The Pope shows clearly the error of this way of thinking and demonstrates how both the social and environmental crises are inextricably linked and are part of one complex problem. This perception is clearer to a person from the Southern hemisphere, because much of the extraction of oil, gas and coal , and much of the deforestation required to feed modern industries have come either from the South or from areas previously under colonial control. In particular it is important to see how a rapacious capitalist economic system, which relies on the accentuation of desire and on consumerist lifestyles for its profits drives the relentless extraction of resources and the exploitation of the earth, which most severely affect the poor.
As I was reading Francis’s critique of the modern industrial system it brought back memories of a remarkably similar critique assayed more than a hundred years ago by Mahatma Gandhi, who in his 1909 tract Hind Swaraj comes up with a similar set of criticisms of the modern techno-economic system, which Gandhi likewise saw as materialistic, soulless and fundamentally violent toward both nature and human life. It mistakes material comfort for progress, constant motion for purposeful movement, restlessness and distraction for vitality and dynamism, speed for efficiency and consumerism for an improved quality of life. In Gandhi’s analysis as well, the ones who pay the highest price for these mistakes are the earth and the poor. In a similar vein, Pope Francis writes: “Once more we need to reject a magical conception of the market, which would suggest that problems could be solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals. Is it realistic to hope that those who are obsessed with maximizing profits will stop to reflect on the environmental damage which they will leave behind for future generations? Where profits alone count, there can be no thinking about the rhythms of nature, its phases of decay and regeneration, or the complexity of ecosystems which may be gravely upset by human intervention.” (paragraph 190)
Much has been said about the need for cooperation between science and ethics as part of an integral ecology, but it seems to me that what the analyses of both Gandhi and Francis reveal is the co-responsibility of modern economists, who increasingly see their discipline as part of the mathematical and natural sciences instead of the social and moral sciences where it truly belongs. The very word “economics” comes from the Greek words oikos (household) and nomos (law or rule) and from Aristotle to as recently as Keynes, economics was seen as a moral science. The father of modern economics, Adam Smith, was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and his famous book, The Wealth of Nations which describes some of the workings of the market as an institution, depends heavily on a prior book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which emphasizes the importance of trust in society and of cooperation. Both economics as a discipline taught in the modern academy and economists who advise governments, corporations, banks and other institutions which help to shape policy have had, I would argue, a largely baleful effect on modern society for which they have not been held accountable. It is not that there have not been critiques of modern economics and economists, as for example in the work of Amartya Sen, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz, Herman Daly, Tim Jackson, and many others. It is rather that these critiques have had relatively little impact on the nature of the discipline and on mainstream economic thinking. It is to be hoped that Laudato Si will add fresh impetus to a long overdue reevaluation of the discipline and its sadly distorted and misplaced priorities.
Any thoughtful person looking at our world today cannot be filled with much optimism. Violence, poverty and instability of many different kinds mark our situation and it is easy to succumb to despair. It is therefore especially valuable and refreshing to encounter a text which is both clear-eyed and sober in its analysis and yet manages to be hopeful, which is, of course, a quite different thing from optimism. Within a brief compass, I have tried to provide some preliminary reflections which I shall in time, together with many others, deepen. There are strong signs that Laudato Si is serving as a rallying cry and a summons to contemplation and action, of which this book itself is a reflection. It seems best to let Pope Francis have the last word: “Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change. We lack an awareness of our common origin, of our mutual belonging, and of a future to be shared with everyone. This basic awareness would enable the development of new convictions, attitudes and forms of life. A great cultural, spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal.” (paragraph 202)