With a follow-up to ‘Laudato Si’, the pope’s environmental encyclical, due to be published 4 October, Suzanne Topham wonders what else the Catholic Church can possibly say on the subject
I met a Catholic a little while ago who told me about his ecological conversion. A few years previously, he had read Laudato Si and been plagued by apocalyptic nightmares in which all he had to leave his children was a scorched wasteland. Environmental action, he told me, is a moral imperative for all Catholics which should be preached from the pulpits across the land.
I was rather surprised. Was this really the first time he had ever thought about the environment? I feel like I can’t get away from people giving me handy tips on everything from water conservation to more environmentally friendly stationary choices.
In fact, Laudato Si itself kicks off with an overview of the last four popes’ quite specific exhortations to stop exploiting nature and start “correcting the models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment” (Laudato Si, Introduction 6). Concern for the environment is not, despite the hand-wringing insistence of certain secular newspapers, a new thing either for Catholics or for humanity as a whole. In fact, Pope Francis himself is well aware of the half-century of theological thought by major figures in the Catholic Church which precedes him.
Thinking about the upcoming “follow up” to “update it on current problems” (Pope Francis, Aug. 21 meeting with European lawyers) Laudato Deum, due on 4th October, I find myself simply wondering what else there is to say.
Laudato Si is not even ten years old. Yes, those have been a long ten years of floods, wildfires, a global pandemic, big promises about CO2 emissions made and big promises about CO2 emissions broken. The Paris Agreement (made at the COP21 conference shortly after Laudato Si was released) is, of course, proving to be not worth the (recycled?) paper it was written on.
But ten years is a mere blink of an eye if your eye is God’s. And for much of human history it was the blink of an eye too: consider the mediaeval cathedrals. You could spend your entire working life on a cathedral building site and die before it was finished. A society which thinks of ten years as a long time is a society which chops down the Amazon rainforest for timber today while not planting any trees for tomorrow. It is a society which kills an unborn baby because having a newborn baby is difficult, rather than thinking of the adult they will become.
Much ink and many pixels have been given to debates over whether or not global warming is happening, whether or not it is caused by human activity, when the point of no return is going to come, and what we all ought to do about it. Being a bit of a tree-hugger myself, I am always reminded of a cartoon by Joel Pett, in which two people at the back of a climate lecture promoting cleaner water, liveable cities and healthy children ask: “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”
However, the big environmental question for Catholics should not be how many tonnes of CO2 we can emit until the world collapses into hellfire itself. Rather, the question should be: do we really believe that God exists?
For if we do, our viewpoint of the scale of the problem changes completely. The current climate crisis is only the latest in a long series of crises in our attitude to God’s earth, just as covid was only the latest in a long series of plagues. Before this was the Dust Bowl; before that was the Great Stink created by large-scale dumping of industrial and human waste into the Thames; before that was the mediaeval deforestation of the Great Clearances.
As Ecclesiastes has it: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
From God’s perspective, therefore, this is (probably!) not the End Times but rather simply another of humankind’s offences against His majesty. For which, yes, we must repent and turn to God and make amends, but for which he (probably!) won’t destroy the earth and everything that is in it. If you really believe that God exists and really believe that he cares for us, you must believe that His will for the human race to continue and be saved is more powerful than recycling, walking instead of using the car or becoming flexitarian. (Which, by the way, used to go by its old-fashioned name: fasting.)
This is not to say that we need do nothing but rather to say that environmental concerns should not be regarded as some strange new form of moral imperative which the church in her 2000-year-history has never had to think about before. Rather, they are the same as other moral concerns such as giving to the poor. Pope Francis himself draws these parallels in Laudato Si: Sister Earth, he says, is the most abandoned and maltreated of the poor.
When we give to the poor, of course we do it to relieve their suffering. The second of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals is Zero Hunger. A laudable goal, of course, but not a very Christian one. For as we remove the glasses of “Now” and look back on history with something approaching God’s eternal perspective, we can hardly count the number of times some group or other has decided that this is the time we’re going to get it right and sort out poverty once and for all. Yet how can we ever expect to solve the problem of inequality when it is a human-created one? A truly Catholic worldview can maintain a hope to do better alongside an acknowledgement of our fallen natures and the knowledge that “the poor you will always have with you”.
Why, then, do we give to the poor? It is not so much about them as it is about us. We give to the poor because they are needy but also because we need to give in order to love. Do we give because we are good Christians, or are we good Christians because we give? Yes and yes. We are not commanded to give to the poor in order to end world hunger, but in order to fulfil God’s law and to mould ourselves into the kind of people who are fit for heaven. We do not pray because God needs us to, but because it is right and proper and because it is good for us, not for Him.
We do not, therefore, care for God’s earth in order to turn it into another Eden but in order to turn ourselves into the kind of people who are fit to dwell in Eden. We do not think about the environment because God needs us to sort out Creation for him, but because we need to do the work of loving every part of Creation and every person dwelling in Creation in order to fit us for our eternal dwelling place in Heaven. Laudato Si urges us to have a conversion of hearts at every level of human society.
Thinking about the whole Earth, even the rainforests in Brazil and the deserts in Africa that we might never personally see, helps us to see the Earth through God’s eyes – eyes that see every sparrow, every lily of the field, every hair on your head with perfect clarity and love. Thinking about people struggling with pollution across the globe, and about future generations and the kind of world we are leaving for them, helps us to think about humanity through God’s eternal perspective in which He sees all times and all people – and loves each and every one of them wholly and completely.
Perhaps Pope Francis will surprise us with Laudato Deum, but I think not. Fallen, broken creatures that we are, we need reminding of the obvious. Just as my children are shocked multiple times a day to learn that I really do mean they have to put their shoes away when they take them off, so the COP28 climate summit will once again tell us that we are in the middle of a climate emergency and we have to take drastic action to avoid the earth becoming uninhabitable. And so, I expect, will Laudato Deum remind us once again of the disproportionate effect of climate change on the poor and the dangers of a throwaway culture for our planet and our souls.
However, it is right and proper in many ways that we should be told again what we have heard before. After all, how many homilies on a Sunday morning are entirely original? And yet don’t we all need reminding once again to love our neighbour and to go to confession? As the news cycle moves ever-quicker, so the cycle of the church’s teaching must move ever-quicker. Pope Francis is rightly cast as a pope for modern times. If we forget more quickly, we must be reminded more often. If we haven’t listened, we must be told again.
Yet every so often I don’t trip over discarded wellies in the doorway – and maybe if we hear the message enough, we might start to take it on board and actually do something about it. Not so much in order that we might reduce our CO2 emissions, but in order that we might think about the needs of others who share our earthly home and love them as ourselves – and as much as our single-use plastics and air-freighted vegetables.
So yes. Recycle. Walk. Go vegan on Fridays. But don’t worry about the Earth becoming uninhabitable. God is real. God cares. God’s got the whole world in his hands.
The question isn’t whether or not climate change is real. The question is: “What if it’s a big hoax and we become better people for nothing?”
(Photo by Vatican Media)
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