Laudato Si’: A Prophetic Message

Abstract

Amounting body of evidence demonstrates that our generation and our civilization teeter on the brink of a man-made disaster of global scale. Climate change stands as the defining question of our century. Calls to global action are as strident and passionate as the enormity of the situation is grave and consequential. Of particular significance is Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato Si’ on the care for our Common Home. This article discusses some of the main messages from Laudato Si’ including its call for pedagogical models of “ecological education” or “environmental education”. The article is adapted withminormodifications from an address at the opening session of the OIECWorld Congress held in New York in June 2019. L ong before the advent of Pope Francis as visionary and prophetic global champion of environmental justice, the late Kenyan Nobel Laureate for Peace, Wangari Muta Maathai (2010), alerted the international community to “the deep ecological wounds visible across the world” (p. 43). Planet Earth, our Mother, she warned, groans under the burden of global warming, pollution of air, water and land; and destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems. Maathai was a prophetic voice amidst a cacophony of climate change naysayers, deniers, cynics and skeptics who, sadly, seem impervious to reason and ethics. Since the pioneering work of Wangari Maathai, a mounting body of evidence demonstrates that our generation and our civilization teeter on the brink of “a man-made disaster of global scale. Our greatest threat in thousands of years,” to quote naturalist Sir David Attenborough (2018, p. 1). Climate change stands as the defining question of our century. For this reason, the calls to global action are as strident and passionate as the enormity of the situation is grave and consequential. 1 Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar Laudato Si’: A Prophetic Message 301 One such call, familiar, I believe, to many in this room, is the encyclical letter, Laudato Si’ (Francis, 2015), of Pope Francis, on the care for our Common Home. In the words of one commentator, [Laudato Si’] is a love poem to the world. It is a beautiful, heartfelt and farreaching plea for action. It speaks straight to our souls and it is rooted in St Francis.... It demands a rethink of Catholicism’s attitude to the Earth and the creatures who live alongside us. (Colwell, 2019, p. 4) With prophetic urgency, Pope Francis laments that “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years” (no. 53). The consequence, he continues, is glaring and incontestable: “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” (no. 21). When the pope declares that we are damaging the Earth we do not have to take his word for it. After all, Francis is neither an environmental scientist nor an atmospheric physicist; but, his analyses and teachings in Laudato Si’ are corroborated by countless independent studies, UN and government reports, conclusions from scientific studies, and the profound wisdom of indigenous peoples, as well as agrarian, pastoral, riparian and coastal communities. These findings recount the same narrative: that this Earth, our Common Home, labors under the weight of pollution and global warming and can no longer carry its burden – that the phenomenon of climate change “threatens the continuing survival of human societies.” There is no gainsaying who is to blame: we are the culprit. “Human activities, including industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, are all drivers of pollution” (Das & Horton, 2017, p. 407). In the words of atmospheric scientist Robert Watson, “We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide” (United Nations, 2019, n.p.). And in plain language, it means we are hurting the Earth and hurting ourselves. Against the backdrop of this existential threat to life on Planet Earth, Laudato Si’ proposes a prophetic manifesto for our world and appeals passionately to our global conscience about the vital and inseparable nexus between human ecology and environmental ecology, between anthropology and ecology. Pope Francis tells us that Planet Earth comprises an integral tapestry of life woven from the collective strands of human life, a biodiversity of flora and fauna and an ecosystem of natural phenomena. Again and again, he reminds us that “We are all related...”; “everything in the world is connected”; we are dependent on one another; we are a “universal family”; “We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it” (Francis, 2015, nos. 16, 42, 89, 91, 92, 117, 120, 138, 141, 142, 240, 139). I believe that such a vital connection underscores the fundamental solidarity that ought to exist between human beings and our natural environment.