In 2018, I said, “Laudato Si’ has been intentionally ignored by various factions within the Church, who have consequently done the devilish work of keeping the Faithful from even considering the letter. The demands of the Pope are too much for some to bear, so they have decided that they will not let the Faithful decide whether they will bear them.”
Little has changed in the intervening five years. Almost all American bishops remain deliberately silent on climate change. No U.S. dioceses have divested from their copious fossil fuel investments. The bishops continue to use our tithes and donations to pay for grave, self-serving sins that impact us all.
We Can No Longer Doubt
Why publish this exhortation now? Pope Francis says he feels the need to make further clarifications and recommendations “because of certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church.” (I have previously written on such reactionary opinions and their consequences.)
He says:
“We can no longer doubt that the reason for the unusual rapidity of these dangerous changes is a fact that cannot be concealed: the enormous novelties that have to do with unchecked human intervention on nature in the past two centuries.”
With a certain weariness, Francis has to say the obvious again:
“It is no longer possible to doubt the human— ‘anthropic’–origin of climate change…It is not possible to conceal the correlation of these global climate phenomena and the accelerated increase in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly since the mid-twentieth century. The overwhelming majority of scientists specializing in the climate support this correlation, and only a very small percentage of them seek to deny the evidence.”
We now live in a world where the rain is plastic. Fossil fuel waste falls from the sky. The very water nourishing the soil is no longer safe to drink. Look outside: there is microscopic plastic coating everything you see. Human beings have never lived and moved in air full of so much carbon dioxide. It is so important to sit with these climate facts, drink them in, and let them disturb and enrage.
As I said then and repeat now, we need to become angry with the anger of Jesus. The good and holy earth has been despoiled by greed, like the Temple courtyard.
Francis makes this point exquisitely in Laudate Deum: “[Jesus] was able to invite others to be attentive to the beauty that there is in the world because he himself was in constant touch with nature, lending it an attraction full of fondness and wonder. As he made his way throughout the land, he often stopped to contemplate the beauty sown by his Father, and invited his disciples to perceive a divine message in things.”
This theme has run through Francis’s papacy and held my attention from the start: God is the one voice speaking to us in all reality, and our deafness to it leads to countless sins. Especially since Laudato Si’, I have made it an object of daily reflection and fuel for practical action.
Eight years after Laudato Si’, we still don’t see that the earth is a gift or that the environment is at our mercy but not under our control. We still believe we have the right to damage the earth, air, and water for our short-term gain, whatever it costs us or someone else.
Let us be done with climate change skepticism—it is unacceptable for a thinking, believing Catholic. It is a grave sin to place the selfish interests of a wealthy few over the earth and the poor. Three years ago, I said that our common home couldn’t wait much longer for us to treat her as a sister and not a slave. The time is shorter now than it was then.
A Technocratic Paradigm of Death
Pope Francis makes much of the world’s current “technocratic paradigm.” Just what does he mean?
It boils down to thinking and acting “as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.” He says that this makes it easy “to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology.”
The Pope tells us what we all know deep within our hearts: the world is strangled by a dictatorship of rampant waste and diabolical consumerism. He aptly labels this a “technocratic paradigm.” Whether we call it a “technocratic paradigm,” late-stage capitalism, or corporate consumerism–we describe the same phenomenon: profit over people.
The modern world systems bow to profit and profit, like cancer, uses the world for unbridled growth that kills the whole body.
In 2018, I reflected on the technocratic paradigm controlling our planet: “We have lost sight of our purpose, of who and what we are, and so can no longer see what the earth is, either. We have abused the world because we abuse ourselves. . . . It is true that each human being is of more worth than all the stars in the sky and fish in the sea.” Having lost sight of that truth, what do we care about the air they breathe or the water they drink?
We have lost our wonder at creation and see it as a tool; the earth and its inhabitants are to be exploited for gain.
Thus, in his new exhortation, perhaps more forcefully than ever, Pope Francis denounced Western civilization again. It is this “civilization” that is doing the most significant damage to the whole earth through its downright Hobbesian philosophy and economics.
As usual, the rich blame the poor for our problems. Francis sees right through this deflection, pointing out that a “low, richer percentage of the planet contaminates more than the poorest 50% of the total world population.” He points out that Africa, home to more than half the poorest people on earth, produces the lowest levels of greenhouse gasses.
Francis called this bluff in Laudato Si’: “A minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.”
And that controlling minority blames the rest, held captive to its will.
We seem to have forgotten that the Lord pronounces woe on the rich. In the modern global economy, wealthier nations and corporations live on the backs of the poor, polluting for profit and power.
As I said in 2020, commenting on Querida Amazonia, “We tend to have a very self-centered view of the world around us, no doubt influenced by our culture’s rampant consumerism. Not only is the modern Western way of life unsustainable, but it is literally responsible for the deaths, dislocations, and despair of innumerable people. As Catholics, we have to come to grips with the reality that our Western mode of existence has palpable consequences throughout the world.”
This is the technocratic paradigm. This is the common enemy killing us all.
Toward a Human Economics
As the Pope says bluntly, “We are now unable to halt the enormous damage we have caused. We barely have time to prevent even more tragic damage.” And we have yet to begin the work needed to prevent the worst effects of climate change.
Far more than a mere physical or biological problem, this crisis has to do “with the economy and the way we conceive it.” Powerful corporate and political interests have made it their mission to distract and deny the issues.
But we are not off the hook. The “small” people of the world, the humble everyday people, must make the difference (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). Pope Francis has no time for the idea that we are helpless to do anything.
In the United States and the rest of the “Western world,” the demand is all the greater. I say again: “We have become exorbitant with excessive energy consumption, indifference to industrial waste, discarding perfectly edible food, cheap and unnecessary products, and sheer unending convenience. This has all been built on the backs of billions of the world’s poor. The market we have built is a sinner’s market. The market is free because its poor are not.”
The powers that be of the world, enslaved as they are to sin, do not want the humble, ordinary people of the earth to realize these things. The Pope points out how the rich and powerful deceive the rest of us with empty economic promises, convincing us to destroy our neighborhoods and livelihoods, in a paragraph that every American should read in full:
“The ethical decadence of real power is disguised thanks to marketing and false information, useful tools in the hands of those with greater resources to employ them to shape public opinion. With the help of these means, whenever plans are made to undertake a project involving significant changes in the environment or high levels of contamination, one raises the hopes of the people of that area by speaking of the local progress that it will be able to generate or of the potential for economic growth, employment and human promotion that it would mean for their children. Yet in reality there does not seem to be any true interest in the future of these people, since they are not clearly told that the project will result in the clearing of their lands, a decline in the quality of their lives, a desolate and less habitable landscape lacking in life, the joy of community and hope for the future; in addition to the global damage that eventually compromises many other people as well.”
I have seen this phenomenon with my eyes and contemplated its scars on my home in Northeast Ohio. I have seen the despair in my neighbors’ faces after Norfolk Southern’s crimes against East Palestine. The economy must be humanized rather than allowed to dictate what is good for human beings. Everyday people must have a deciding say in the business and government actions happening in their locales. There is no other way to solve this crisis or prevent another one in the future.
We require a resurgence of power “from below” rather than more top-down solutions that only serve the ruling elites. The Pope hopes this will be our future in the face of climate change, which is why he repeats his familiar point “that ‘unless citizens control political power – national, regional and municipal – it will not be possible to control damage to the environment.'”
We need a new economic vision based on a new social paradigm. The old systems are not working; it is time for something new.
Francis hopes for a sort of new wine bursting the old wineskins of political and economic power. What does not serve humanity as a whole will have to go by the way of history. The Pope calls for the radical (“at the root”) inclusion of all people of goodwill in solving this crisis. It is up to us, “from below,” to make it a reality.
This involves giving ordinary people an authoritative say in our society’s course. It involves a genuine redistribution of wealth, especially productive wealth such as land and factories, and a communal sharing of the good things of the earth.
Rejecting Despair
Keep your hope alive. As the saying goes, don’t give up the ship. (We don’t get another one.)
We must know where we currently stand to move forward. There is cause for hope even in our recent past. One can also think of the anti-nuclear weapons movement of the 1970s and ’80s, including the likes of Dorothy Day, and the great strides it made toward disarmament (another crisis that today requires new energy from our apostolate).
With this fact in mind, Pope Francis encourages us, “Efforts by households to reduce pollution and waste, and to consume with prudence, are creating a new culture…Let us realize, then, that even though this does not immediately produce a notable effect from the quantitative standpoint, we are helping to bring about large processes of transformation rising from deep within society.”
Acting in faith, we are already building a new society within the shell of the old. Believing and living as if an injury to one is an injury to all (1 Corinthians 12:6), we are already creating a new and better world.
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