‘Look at the world not from without but from within’ (para 220).
This is, I think, my favourite sentence in the whole Encyclical, which is a triumph of integrated thinking, even if one cannot necessarily agree with some of the reiterations of traditional Catholic teaching. Its orthodoxy, though, is a strength. Pope Francis has provided a basis for making concern for the environment core to Christian theology and activity. His interweaving of human and natural ecologies echoes Old Testament calls for all of human society to repent at the Feast of the Atonement in order to restore the fertility of the whole earth.
The Encyclical’s spirituality, above all, is exquisite. Out of this sweet poetry a great tide can turn as our hearts are moved and a fierce determination to think and act differently is born. This is what religion can give to the environmental movement: the reason and the inner strength to see and to act. This is why religions are the best, perhaps the only, hope to bring about the critical change needed in our understanding of what it is for humanity to flourish. Religions can speak both to our whole human family and to each of our innermost selves.
For the response to the environmental challenge has to be global or it cannot be wise. It has to be personal or it cannot be activated. Religions can offer the spirit of seeing the whole and the spirit of individual strength to believe it is possible to change now, when it seems so horribly late and we seem incapable of designing human systems in a ways that don’t harm someone or something, usually somewhere else (but ‘there is nowhere called away where we can throw things’, says religion, whose God is universal).
Catholics attend Mass. As well as offering a spiritual basis to all people for the mindset that will keep looking and working till it finds the systems that do no harm, Pope Francis, through this Encyclical, can with breathtaking efficiency speak directly to every Catholic on the planet. He can stir a mighty army. Because the Encyclical is so coherent, it can speak to every condition of every Catholic. And let it not be said too loudly, this is a brilliant missionary tool, because the issue is both so spiritual and so vital to every human being. Don’t talk to your non-religious friends about being religious, talk about the principle of the Sabbath rest for the whole earth as well as humanity (paras 68, 71). Talk about not being in a hurry. Talk about interdependence (86) and ‘ecological virtues’ (88). ‘See beauty’ (215). Talk about lowering consumption so as not to ‘baffle the heart’ (222). Listen to nature ‘filled with the words of love’ (para 225). Smile (230). Walk.
One final point: Pope Francis suggests that God created the world and found it ‘good’. Actually He didn’t. Having created quite a lot of things which He did find good, He created a man on his own, and this, He found, was ‘not good’ (Gen 2.18).
Claire Foster-Gilbert is Director of the Westminster Abbey Institute
Check out the next blog in our Encyclical series: Ben Ryan argues that it is the analysis of what it is to be human in Laudato Si' that elevates a dreary environmental debate
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