The green legacy of Pope Francis is encapsulated in his encyclical Laudato Si’. It is a beacon that upended centuries of Catholic church teaching by framing a dialogue for all of humanity. It embraced green radicalism, pleading for collective action to rescue Mother Earth.
Subtitled “On the Care of our Common Home”, the challenges it presented went beyond “tagging God into the global conversation on climate change” – and the target was far beyond the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
Published in June 2015, the message of Laudato Si’ (Praise Be to You) was arresting; the accompanying environmental audit of the world was breathtaking. It was designed to transmit a message of “serious moral responsibility” to protect the environment.
Francis highlighted human damage to the planet that had exacerbated poverty, particularly in the developing world. “A true ‘ecological debt’ exists, particularly between the global north and south,” it said, citing over-exploitation of resources and a throwaway lifestyle of the better-off that is frequently incompatible with a sustainable world.
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He was clear on where obligations rested: almost totally among wealthier countries and powerful multinational corporations.
“It is our marching orders for advocacy,” Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of the US Congress of Catholic Bishops said.
Columban missionary Fr Seán McDonagh, an unlikely contributor to the document, says Laudato Si’ “is probably the best encyclical I have seen going back to the 19th century”.
In his book Laudato Si’: an Irish Response (2017), McDonagh wrote it “is the first papal document to understand the magnitude of the ecological destruction taking place globally and the urgency with which it must be faced”.
It rows back on biblical tradition, he says, which dictated that mankind multiply and take over the Earth including every living creature.
It addresses “the central issue of our time – climate change – and destruction of biodiversity”, McDonagh says, but 10 years on “unfortunately, the Catholic church didn’t take seriously the message in Laudato Si’”.
It is seldom at the centre of Christian faith today, he says. And given the world is closer to climate tipping points and scientific evidence provides unprecedented clarity, “a new Laudato Si’ is required”.
On a personal basis, he says he had “a poor enough record with the Vatican” because of his 1990 book The Greening of the Church, which said it must address the global population issue.
McDonagh’s involvement was initiated after he wrote an article for the Universal Catholic in November 2013. He got a call from Cardinal Peter Turkson, the pope’s leading climate adviser, who asked him to write a paper on connections between justice and the creation.
He told the cardinal he had a fractious relationship with his predecessor Cardinal Renato Martino, especially after he had run a Vatican conference in 2007 and invited six climate sceptics from the US. That did not preclude McDonagh’s input.
Within the church, the encyclical was criticised as negating the Christian tradition, but from conversations with Francis after its publication, McDonagh says, the pope was undeterred and displayed profound understanding of ecology and this was reflected in subsequent sermons.
As “an ageing atheist”, the late environmentalist Michael Viney, in a 2017 column in The Irish Times, praised the encyclical: “I can only cheer the greening of the church in such an influential manner.”
He praised McDonagh’s crusade of over 30 years for “ecotheology”, but said: “Laudato Si’ quite failed to acknowledge human overpopulation as the driver of planetary degradation.”
Viney noted, however, the encyclical’s value in granting to natural ecosystems “an intrinsic value independent of their usefulness. Each organism, as a creature of God, is good and admirable in itself ...”
Laudato Si’ was “timed to be political” in advance of the annual UN gathering of almost 200 countries on climate action, Cop21 in Paris, says Lorna Gold, director of the Laudato Si’ Movement. Pope Francis was “a political mover” and it was accompanied by a successful diplomatic offensive, she says.
It fed into an ambitious coalition including Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; lead architect of the landmark Paris Agreement, Laurence Tubiana, and small island states (arguably the most vulnerable to climate disruption). This was a key catalyst in forging the historic Paris Agreement.
In addressing “all people on the planet”, Francis went beyond his flock, Gold says. “One of the revolutionary things is that it was the first church document to quote science, philosophy, poetry. It was not self-reverential as so many documents were in the past.”
Pope Francis called for an intense and fruitful dialogue between religion and science, where, in the words of theologian Fr Dermot A Lane, “the human is the culmination of the unfolding history of the cosmos and the evolution of life on Earth”.
Vibrancy
The encyclical said: “The divine and the human meet in the slightest detail in the seamless garment of God’s creation, in the last speck of dust of our planet.”
It emerged from wide consultation – including contributions from Ireland, especially from McDonagh on biodiversity – “which made it more rounded”, Gold says. This meant it was well received among environmental luminaries of the left such as Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and former president Mary Robinson.
A decade on, “it has been a harder struggle in bringing it into the mainstream of the church than you would have thought”, Gold says.
It does not get talked about often as negative stories surface, including clerical sex abuse, but there is a vibrant movement around Laudato Si’, Gold says. In the timeline of the church, 10 years is the blink of an eye, so this is laying foundations.
The movement is established in 191 countries including Ireland but concentrated in the Global South. More than 25,000 “animators” have been trained “to lead efforts to bring Laudato Si’ to their communities and to green the church”.
“Whether it’s a transformation of the church, it’s too early to say. There’s a vibrancy and people relate this to their faith and to social justice,” Gold says.
Despite internal opposition, Francis worked to advocate for “ecological conversion” and “integral ecology”.
The church’s leadership has taken a strong position on the unfolding climate and biodiversity crises. It has not endorsed the proposed Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, a global initiative to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, but more than 100 Catholic institutions have done so.
Many parts of the church have divested from fossil fuels and Francis spoke out on the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground – much to the ire of Big Oil.
In advance of Cop26, the UN climate summit held in Glasgow in 2021, the Vatican hosted a meeting of world religious leaders who took a common stand on environment in the hope it would raise ambitions of global leaders. It was attended by 40 faith leaders of the world’s major religions and scientists from 20 countries. They called for “ecological conversion rooted in the common good”.
Days before Cop26, on BBC Radio 4’s “Thought for the Day”, Francis said only urgent action could “offer concrete hope to future generations” and called on leaders to “take radical decisions”.
Overall, however, Cop26 was a failure; a call to “consign coal power to history” did not happen. Last-minute interventions by China and India weakened the final text.
Francis’s concern about persistent lack of political will in the run-up to Cop28 in Dubai in 2023 (which he had been due to attend, only to withdraw because of illness), and the fractious global context in which climate was being discussed, led him to double down on his climate message.
He published an apostolic letter, Laudate Deum (Praise God), calling out specifically the influence of corporate interests in multilateral processes at Cop summits. “To say that there is nothing to hope for [at Cop28] would be suicidal, for it would mean exposing all humanity, especially the poorest, to the worst impacts of climate change,” he wrote.
His schedule for Dubai was to have included meeting heads of state from small island states who had called for the treaty, an act of solidarity which would have been striking.
Robinson was at the launch of Laudato Si’, which she described as “a call for climate justice from one of the most influential moral voices on our planet today”.
Before his death she said: “I have a great admiration for how Pope Francis has managed to speak about climate and nature in a seamless way. It’s quite clear he understands we have to value and respect nature as well as climate – and also link it to issues of poverty. His influence has been enormous.”
Influenced by writings of Seán McDonagh, Prof John Sweeney, Lorna Gold, Fr Tim Bartlett and others, Irish bishops embraced ecotheology and climate change challenges before most of their confreres. This led to the 2014 pastoral letter The Cry of the Earth. Echoes of this can be seen in Laudato Si’.
The bishops called on “parishes, through their parish pastoral councils and diocesan trusts, as a first step, to identify and care for 30 per cent of parish grounds as a haven for pollinators and biodiversity” – to be enjoyed in perpetuity by “the whole community”, a phrase applied to entire localities, in the interests of a collective humanity and true to the spirit of Laudato Si’.
