Whatever would Galileo have thought?
Pope Francis is taking his stand alongside the vast majority of climate scientists and against the misuse of political power in a way that has greatly unnerved some commentators. The Encyclical Letter on the environment (Laudato Si’: Praised Be - On Care for our Common Home, 24 May 2015) may well prove to be as momentous and historic in a positive way as the attitude of Pope Urban VIII in Galileo’s time was negative. It is one measure of the huge political and global significance of the Pope’s intervention that, even before publication, many climate change sceptics, particularly American Republicans, were running scared and trying to get their rebuttals in first. Presumably they are well aware that if the Pope is right, their economic theories and political priorities will have significantly to change. The Pope has pulled the rug from under continuing political inertia and mutual recrimination, and has called humanity to awaken our conscience and to take urgent action.
Pope Francis writes on behalf of the Earth as ‘our common home’, and particularly from the perspective of the poorest inhabitants who have done least to cause environmental damage, the tragic effects of which harm them most. He outlines the degradation, largely caused by human activity in the last 200 years, which has already made - and will increasingly make - life difficult in many parts of the world. One example is the denial of the basic human right of clean water to many of the world’s poorest people because of the selfishness and greed of richer people. We need, he says, to integrate the question of justice so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.
The Pope has written ‘to every living person’. It is an accessible and passionate plea to all humanity to respond to the dangers of environmental degradation which affect us all, but to see this in the context of the calling to recover our authentic humanity in healthy and life-giving relationships with the planet and with each other. ‘We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world.’ He gives ecology a human meaning.
Climate change is one of the principal challenges addressed in the Encyclical. Pope Francis urges all people, and especially those of us in the rich nations, to move urgently towards reducing dependence on fossil fuels, increasing energy efficiency, and promoting renewable sources of energy. This will mean a complete reshaping of our economics away from the assumption of technological power in which we humans have seen ourselves as ‘lords and masters’ of nature, and towards a new lifestyle rooted in life-giving spiritual and moral values. The Pope is very critical of waste, of the loss of biodiversity, of the belief in apparently limitless consumption and the unprecedented damage this is doing to the ecosystem and to the mutual bonds necessary for healthy human relationships. He underlines the interconnectedness and interdependence of all creation. He calls on us to reawaken a grateful and sacrificial spirituality and the sense of our human oneness with nature, as well as our special human vocation under God to be ‘protectors of God’s handiwork’: to recover, that is, the sense that nature is God’s gift entrusted to us, and recover love for our common home. There is, he says, still time for humanity to wake up and take creative action, but the need is urgent.
A similar sense of crisis was demonstrated in the recent Lambeth Declaration by leaders of faith communities in the UK. From a Church of England perspective, this should include injecting urgency about creation care into, for example, our prayers; into ordination training; into Bishops’ study days for clergy; into sermons from our pulpits; into debates about investment in the forthcoming General Synod. The Pope appeals for a new dialogue and process of education about how we are shaping the future of the planet. Let us make sure the Church of England plays its full part in that.
The really exciting thing from a Christian perspective is not only the Pope’s gratitude to God for science and technology, while underlining the serious damage done by the power of a technocracy unrestrained by morality; not only the theological underpinning throughout on biblical thinking about creation, incarnation and sacrament, and on Catholic social teaching; it is that the whole Encyclical is ‘book-ended’ and suffused in prayer and worship. Pope Francis celebrates creation as gift of God’s love; he speaks as does his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, of ‘our sister, Mother Earth’; he grieves over the damage which sin and selfishness in human beings has caused to ‘God’s handiwork’, and he pleads for a recovery of our humanness as God’s joyous image bearers in responsibly loving, cultivating and caring for God’s creation. Laudato Si’, mi’ Signore: Praise be to you, my Lord.
Bishop David Atkinson is Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Southwark, and former Bishop of Thetford. He is the author of Renewing the Face of the Earth: A Theological and Pastoral Response to Climate Change (Canterbury Press, 2008)
Check out the next blog in our Encyclical series: Brian Cuthbertson perceives an openness to partnership with different traditions in defence of the environment
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Image by David Evers from wikimedia.org, available in the public domain.
