Laudate Deum: Leadership
On October 4, 2023, Pope Francis published an ‘Apostolic Exhortation’ entitled Laudate Deum (‘Praise God’). We provided an overview of the document here. In this and the next posts we discuss Francis’s message, and what it means to the faith community.
Background
Laudate Deum is a follow up to the encyclical Laudato Sí that was published in the year 2015. Francis explains why he felt the need to write this new publication.
Eight years have passed since I published the Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’, when I wanted to share with all of you, my brothers and sisters of our suffering planet, my heartfelt concerns about the care of our common home. Yet, with the passage of time, I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.
In the previous post in this series — Laudato Deum: Disappointment — I shared some of my concerns to do with the this Apostolic Exhortation. In this post I would like to show how Francis really understands the dilemmas we face, what theological questions need to be answered, and how the church can provide leadership.
Collapse
Francis looks reality in the face. He does not try to kid any of us with hopium, greenwashing, or faith in technology. At the very start of the letter he says,
2. Eight years have passed since I published the Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’, when I wanted to share with all of you, my brothers and sisters of our suffering planet, my heartfelt concerns about the care of our common home. Yet, with the passage of time, I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point. In addition to this possibility, it is indubitable that the impact of climate change will increasingly prejudice the lives and families of many persons. We will feel its effects in the areas of healthcare, sources of employment, access to resources, housing, forced migrations, etc.
Straight away he uses words such as ‘collapse’ and ‘breaking point’. He is not fooling around. Maybe this is because he spent most of his ministry in relatively poor areas of the world — he takes nothing for granted.
He also understands the long-term nature of our dilemmas.
15. Some effects of the climate crisis are already irreversible, at least for several hundred years, such as the increase in the global temperature of the oceans, their acidification and the decrease of oxygen. Ocean waters have a thermal inertia and centuries are needed to normalize their temperature and salinity, which affects the survival of many species. This is one of the many signs that the other creatures of this world have stopped being our companions along the way and have become instead our victims.
Systems Thinking
One of the weaknesses of the climate movement is that many people see climate change as a stand-alone problem that can be solved in isolation. Francis seems to grasp that climate change is, in fact, linked to many other equally important dilemmas. He says,
17. Certain apocalyptic diagnoses may well appear scarcely reasonable or insufficiently grounded. This should not lead us to ignore the real possibility that we are approaching a critical point. Small changes can cause greater ones, unforeseen and perhaps already irreversible, due to factors of inertia. This would end up precipitating a cascade of events having a snowball effect. In such cases, it is always too late, since no intervention will be able to halt a process once begun. There is no turning back. We cannot state with certainty that all this is going to happen, based on present conditions. But it is certain that it continues to be a possibility, if we take into account phenomena already in motion that “sensitize” the climate, like the reduction of ice sheets, changes in ocean currents, deforestation in tropical rainforests and the melting of permafrost in Russia, etc.
67. The Judaeo-Christian vision of the cosmos defends the unique and central value of the human being amid the marvellous concert of all God’s creatures, but today we see ourselves forced to realize that it is only possible to sustain a “situated anthropocentrism”. To recognize, in other words, that human life is incomprehensible and unsustainable without other creatures. For “as part of the universe… all of us are linked by unseen bonds and together form a kind of universal family, a sublime communion which fills us with a sacred, affectionate and humble respect”.
Climate change is not the problem; climate change is a symptom of the real problem/predicament, which is that we cannot maintain growth on a finite planet. If we could somehow wave a magic wand and remove all CO2 from the atmosphere, then some other factor would become the high-profile crisis.
His language in paragraph 25 could have been taken from the Celtic vision of the Christian faith.
25. Contrary to this technocratic paradigm, we say that the world that surrounds us is not an object of exploitation, unbridled use and unlimited ambition. Nor can we claim that nature is a mere “setting” in which we develop our lives and our projects. For “we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it”, and thus “we [do] not look at the world from without but from within”.
Language such as this quickly leads us to the concept of Gaia — the idea that the Earth as a whole is a living entity.
In the previous post we stated that Francis seems to hold out hope that the leaders of large nations and corporations will provide leadership. However, he recognizes that new procedures for decision making are called for.
43. All this presupposes the development of a new procedure for decision-making and legitimizing those decisions, since the one put in place several decades ago is not sufficient nor does it appear effective. In this framework, there would necessarily be required spaces for conversation, consultation, arbitration, conflict resolution and supervision, and, in the end, a sort of increased “democratization” in the global context, so that the various situations can be expressed and included. It is no longer helpful for us to support institutions in order to preserve the rights of the more powerful without caring for those of all.
Leadership
We can discuss the specifics of what Pope Francis says in Laudato Sí and Laudato Deum indefinitely. However, what is more important is that he is providing honest leadership. He looks reality in the face, and states that our present course could be suicidal (his word). He is also willing to recognize the role of science in formulating an effective response.
Profound and deep changes are needed to our political and commercial systems, and those changes must involve morality and a concern for those who lack resources to respond to all these changes.
56. We must move beyond the mentality of appearing to be concerned but not having the courage needed to produce substantial changes. We know that at this pace in just a few years we will surpass the maximum recommended limit of 1.5° C and shortly thereafter even reach 3° C, with a high risk of arriving at a critical point. Even if we do not reach this point of no return, it is certain that the consequences would be disastrous and precipitous measures would have to be taken, at enormous cost and with grave and intolerable economic and social effects. Although the measures that we can take now are costly, the cost will be all the more burdensome the longer we waits.
68. This is not a product of our own will; its origin lies elsewhere, in the depths of our being, since “God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement”. Let us stop thinking, then, of human beings as autonomous, omnipotent and limitless, and begin to think of ourselves differently, in a humbler but more fruitful way.
Conclusions
As time permits, we will discuss Francis’s two documents in future posts. But fundamentally what matters most is not the details of his analyses and prescriptions. What really matters is that he is laying out path forward for the church in these difficult and scary times.
Would that other churches — including my own Episcopal Church — showed similar leadership.
