Today Pope Francis has published his apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, a sequel of sorts to 2015’s encyclical Laudato Si’, focusing more narrowly on the issue of climate change. Given the rapid worsening of the problem since 2015, it was a given that Laudate Deum would be written in a worried, frustrated tone, and indeed it was. However, it is shot through with calls, not necessarily to optimism, but to hope. Here are ten passages from Laudate Deum that I think are especially illuminating when it comes to where Pope Francis is leading the Church on climate issues. Many of them refute erroneous ideas widespread in public and interpersonal discussions of the subject; there is an almost “Syllabus of Errors” quality to parts of Laudate Deum, in which Francis demolishes various arguments against climate action, or in favor of types of climate action that do not comport with sound morals.
This is a global social issue and one intimately related to the dignity of human life. The Bishops of the United States have expressed very well this social meaning of our concern about climate change, which goes beyond a merely ecological approach, because “our care for one another and our care for the earth are intimately bound together. Climate change is one of the principal challenges facing society and the global community. The effects of climate change are borne by the most vulnerable people, whether at home or around the world”. In a few words, the Bishops assembled for the Synod for Amazonia said the same thing: “Attacks on nature have consequences for people’s lives”. And to express bluntly that this is no longer a secondary or ideological question, but a drama that harms us all, the African bishops stated that climate change makes manifest “a tragic and striking example of structural sin”.
In this passage, paragraph 3 of the exhortation, Francis quotes several bishops’ conferences refuting the idea that, as Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller ludicrously asserted in 2018, “environmental policy is nothing to do with faith or morals.” I find it especially noteworthy that Francis quotes the USCCB given its current leanings within the general factional environment of the Church.
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. Droughts and floods, the dried-up lakes, communities swept away by seaquakes and flooding ultimately have the same origin. At the same time, if we speak of a global phenomenon, we cannot confuse this with sporadic events explained in good part by local factors.
We’ve all seen this political cartoon or heard someone make this joke; the jokes are never funny and the cartoons are never well-drawn. “So much for global warming!” someone guffaws as a snowflake drifts by. Well, no, it doesn’t work like that, and Pope Francis takes care to spell that out here, in paragraph 7 of the exhortation.
In Laudato Si’, I offered a brief resumé of the technocratic paradigm underlying the current process of environmental decay. It is “a certain way of understanding human life and activity [that] has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us”. Deep down, it consists in thinking “as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such”. As a logical consequence, it then becomes easy “to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology”.
The common Pope Francis theme of the technocratic paradigm in which life becomes a series of instruments, inputs and outputs, and utilitarian calculations emerges with full force here, in paragraph 20 of the exhortation. Francis’s expansion on this over the next several section of Laudate Deum refutes starry-eyed technological optimism in favor of what I might call an “informed Luddism,” the Luddism not of knee-jerk opposition to invention but of the original English machine-breakers of the early nineteenth century. These were people who would have been fine with the use of water frames and spinning mules if that use had not served to impoverish workers, enrich factory owners, and mutilate women and children.
Without a doubt, the natural resources required by technology, such as lithium, silicon and so many others, are not unlimited, yet the greater problem is the ideology underlying an obsession: to increase human power beyond anything imaginable, before which nonhuman reality is a mere resource at its disposal. Everything 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.
Francis develops this theme further here, in paragraph 22 of the exhortation: the technocratic paradigm is not about the technologies themselves, although they may well be damaging as such, but about an ideology, what he calls in other places throwaway culture, a manifestation of the broader culture of death.
Not every increase in power represents progress for humanity. We need only think of the “admirable” technologies that were employed to decimate populations, drop atomic bombs and annihilate ethnic groups. There were historical moments where our admiration at progress blinded us to the horror of its consequences. But that risk is always present, because “our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience… We stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear- minded self-restraint”. It is not strange that so great a power in such hands is capable of destroying life, while the mentality proper to the technocratic paradigm blinds us and does not permit us to see this extremely grave problem of present-day humanity.
In case the point about reflexive optimism about technology for its own sake was not yet clear, Francis spells it out with special explicitness and force here, in paragraph 24 of the exhortation.
For this reason, a healthy ecology is also the result of interaction between human beings and the environment, as occurs in the indigenous cultures and has occurred for centuries in different regions of the earth. Human groupings have often “created” an environment, reshaping it in some way without destroying it or endangering it. The great present-day problem is that the technocratic paradigm has destroyed that healthy and harmonious relationship. In any event, the indispensable need to move beyond that paradigm, so damaging and destructive, will not be found in a denial of the human being, but include the interaction of natural systems “with social systems”.
So should human beings simply absent ourselves from the situation, concluding that we are the problem and cannot ever be anything else? No, says Francis in paragraph 27; we are not morally permitted to shirk our responsibilities to God’s creation through simple self-denial…
To say that there is nothing to hope for would be suicidal, for it would mean exposing all humanity, especially the poorest, to the worst impacts of climate change.
…or through “doomerism” and refusal to hope for a change for the better, he says when he returns to this in paragraph 53, above.
I consider it essential to insist that “to seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system”. It is true that efforts at adaptation are needed in the face of evils that are irreversible in the short term. Also some interventions and technological advances that make it possible to absorb or capture gas emissions have proved promising. Nonetheless, we risk remaining trapped in the mindset of pasting and papering over cracks, while beneath the surface there is a continuing deterioration to which we continue to contribute. To suppose that all problems in the future will be able to be solved by new technical interventions is a form of homicidal pragmatism, like pushing a snowball down a hill.
Carbon capture and climate adaptation are admirable in themselves, but not solutions to the deeper cultural, ideological, and, yes, spiritual problem. Secular science writers, including science fiction novelists, are starting to address this problem as well, such as in Neal Stephenson’s recent novel Termination Shock. Pope Francis tackles it here, in paragraph 57 of Laudate Deum.
Hence, “the creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise, because the risen One is mysteriously holding them to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end. The very flowers of the field and the birds which his human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence”. If “the universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely… there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face”. The world sings of an infinite Love: how can we fail to care for it?
This is a deep Franciscan spirituality going back to SS. Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure themselves, and even further back to the life and preaching of Christ Himself, as the Pope has already established by the time we get to the above passage in paragraph 65.
“Praise God” is the title of this letter. For when human beings claim to take God’s place, they become their own worst enemies.
The final lines of the exhortation, in paragraph 73, say it all. After several paragraphs dealing with the role of personal conversion and small improvements in our own lives (the small is reflected in the great; small changes build a culture more receptive to larger changes, even if I am not actually going to fix the problem by composting or driving less), Pope Francis leaves us with this final word of warning. We would do well to heed it.
Image: Extreme drought in Mopane Forest, South Africa. Photography by Bernard Dupont. From Wikimedia Commons.
Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution. He works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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