Hope for our poor earth

Dec 18, 2015

By Fr Paul Fyfe, SJ
Twenty years ago, there was some hope that countries would take strong and sensible action to address climate change, just as we had in 1987 when we faced the major depletion of the ozone layer. The following years slowly erased this hope.

The Church did not do enough to stem disappointment. While bishops and popes made significant statements, particularly from 1990 onwards, and Benedict XVI was dubbed the ‘green pope’ by National Geographic, serious action on the ground was limited, and Church teaching hamstrung by the failure to recognise clearly the intrinsic worth of God’s Creation. The Church needed to affirm that the worth of the rest of the universe was not dependent on humanity: ‘stewardship’ alone was not going to provide sufficient grounds for the needed changes.

It was during the course of 2015 that Pope Francis provided us with a ray of hope. He wants us to take action — urgently. The appeal in his June encyclical, Laudato Si’, rings out with ‘urgent ... urgently ... urgency!’

These are not just words. He has been throwing all the resources he can muster behind the encyclical. He talked it up a lot in public, long before it was published. His twin academies, of science and social science, were brought into play. (Note that the 75 members of the Pontifical Academy of Science count 21 Nobel prizes among them.)

This new aspect of Catholic social teaching is addressed to all people of goodwill. It was launched on June 18 by an atheist climate scientist; a professor with a background in economics, finance, business and commerce; the top Orthodox theologian on ecology, who is also an archbishop; a teacher familiar with human and environmental degradation, as well as signs of hope; not to mention an African cardinal.

This letter on our ‘common home,’ our sister Earth, was launched early so that it could have maximum effect on two critical international meetings in 2015. The Pope did not sit back to see what happens, but the day after he spoke to the US Congress in Washington, he wanted to speak to the September United Nations summit meeting for the setting of new sustainable development goals until 2030.

His other major target was the Paris Conference on Climate Change.

By declaring ‘the Lord rejoices in all his works’ (Psalm 104 verse 31), and including non-living things like the moon among God’s creatures, Laudato Si’ was able to more fully explain how God’s becoming one of us requires the Church to grasp the nettle of a human-induced ecological crisis and climate change.

It has gone further than I ever would have expected, by linking the ecology of nature with the ecology of human society and individuals. The Pope powerfully links ‘the earth herself, burdened and laid waste’ to the lot of the poor of the world: she is ‘among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.’

We need to generate a fair bit of energy into amplifying the Pope's intense concern, at once heartfelt and deeply reasoned. In many countries, we don’t see the Church making common cause with the sort of people the Pope has enjoined to deal with this common threat.

The Pope is calling not just for necessary conversion, but for urgent dialogue and action. At stake, too, is our conscience and the commandment that we not kill.

Some critics who perhaps don’t grasp the urgency of the situation might take the Pope to task over the issue of population. But he quite rightly says, ‘To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues’.

Laudato Si’ provides a comprehensive understanding of what humans need to do to ensure the earth is open to the transmission and sustaining of life, especially human life. Giving a nod to the development of doctrine on population in the light of such an integral ecology would have embraced more people of goodwill. -- Eureka Street