Pope Francis’ Advancement of the Catholic Climate Agenda
National Catholic Register, 27 April 2021
Both Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict contended that life ethics and social ethics should go together in theory. Pope Francis argues that they really do go together in practice.
Pope Francis issued two messages for Earth Day, April 22, including a brief video address to President Joe Biden’s two-day climate summit of world leaders. He endorsed the general climate goals of the upcoming Glasgow summit this November, just as his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si, was intended to support the U.N. goals at the Paris climate summit that year.
Indeed, May 2020-May 2021 was declared a “Laudato Si Year” at the Vatican to give an added boost to the Glasgow summit, originally scheduled for last November.
Whenever the Vatican aligns itself with the climate agenda of the United Nations, concerns are raised about the allies that the Church finds at her side — often those who also promote policies on life, sexuality and the family at odds with Catholic teaching.
For the most part under Pope Francis, the Vatican has simply ignored those criticisms. But in an important passage in a recent book, Pope Francis explained his thinking.
Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future was released last December. The book is sui generis; it is not an interview book, but arose from interviews between the Holy Father and his authoritative biographer, Austen Ivereigh. The book is written in the Holy Father’s voice, so may be considered a ghost-written book, with the writer not so ghostly. The book’s title page states that Pope Francis is the author, “in conversation with Austen Ivereigh.”
Pope Francis explains that he sees the ecological crisis and the crisis of a “throwaway” society — abortion, euthanasia, gender ideology, family breakdown, indifference to migrants, sex trafficking, exploitation of vulnerable workers — as related.
“I made the case [in Laudato Si] that an ecological conversion is necessary to save humanity not only from destroying nature but from destroying itself,” Pope Francis/Ivereigh wrote on pages 34-35 in Let Us Dream. “I called for an ‘integral ecology,’ an ecology that is about much more than caring for nature; it’s about caring for each other as fellow creatures of a loving God, and all that this implies.”
A large part of what is “implied” appears in the Holy Father’s subsequent 2020 encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, on the care and concern owed to each other within the human family.
In Let Us Dream, drafted at more or less the same time as Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis makes his conceptual framework clear.
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