How Has ‘Laudato Si’ Fared After 5 Years?
National Catholic Register, 26 May 2020
Five points to consider regarding Pope Francis’ ecological encyclical, Laudato Si, on its five-year publication anniversary.
Last week the Vatican celebrated “Laudato Si Week” to coincide with the worldwide observance of the centennial of the birth of St. John Paul the Great.
This week, for the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’ ecological encyclical, it has launched “Laudato Si Year,” with a full program of conferences, seminars and activities of both a scientific and political nature. It will be the most intense program of pastoral activity initiated by the Holy See since the Jubilee of Mercy in 2015-2016.
Is Laudato Si, dated May 24, 2015, Pentecost Sunday, and released a few weeks later, in June, the defining pastoral priority of this pontificate?
In introducing his encyclical five years ago, Pope Francis compared this moment in history to “fifty years ago, with the world teetering on the brink of nuclear crisis.”
“Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration,” Pope Francis wrote (3), “I wish to address every person living on this planet. In my apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, I wrote to all the members of the Church with the aim of encouraging ongoing missionary renewal. In this encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home.”
It is not a matter of mutually exclusive priorities, but one of emphasis. To the Church, the Holy Father speaks of the priority of evangelization, getting people to that “better world” (heaven), to borrow the phrasing of Benedict XVI in his 2010 interview book, Light of the World. For all peoples, the priority is “making this world better,” in terms of caring for the physical world and those in poverty — the twin cries, as Pope Francis puts it, “of the earth and of the poor.”
Is it possible to understand the Jubilee of Mercy as the pastoral commemoration of Evangelii Gaudium, while this Laudato Si Year does the same for its eponymous encyclical?
Whether or not the world embraces the Laudato Si Year remains to be seen. But on this anniversary it is possible to look at how the priorities of the encyclical have fared these past five years. The encyclical offered at least five such priorities: political action, pollution, poverty, climate change and technocratic globalization.
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