Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home (May 24/15, Pentecost Sunday) can be read or interpreted as making five central and very general claims. And yet it also gives special and concrete content to the Church leadership’s call for a new evangelization for our times, that some of us may have been pondering the meaning of for sometime now.
- We have entered upon, and it has now come upon us – an environmental-ecological-social crisis of unprecedented scale. This is a crisis that causes much greater suffering among the poor though it is affecting and will affect everyone.
- This problem and challenge now calls for profound and radical changes which the Pope refers to as an ecological conversion on all levels – that involves both personal and social change.
- This change that is necessary is not only a matter of information and knowledge but one of attitude, motivation, and wisdom towards the common good of the whole of creation.
- There are real resources available to us and that we can draw upon in the best of our religious traditions, especially as they speak to a recovery of wonder for the goodness and beauty of creation, for the natural world, and for just and right relations with each other and all of creation. This it must be said also requires an asceticism of power, a type of spiritual and material renunciation both individually and collectively.
- Christians have their particular and special spiritual gifts and resources as well as their particular responsibility rooted in the Gospel of Christ. This now must involve genuine dialogue and concerted collaborative action towards the common good with others of various traditions. It will mean confronting and overcoming conflicts and divisions. It will require serious personal and institutional commitments at both the local and global levels of society.
Commentary
This is in so many respects an inadequate summary representation of the breadth and depth of this important document that Pope Francis himself describes as both troubling and joyful. Serious readers of this document will find certain passages have a special significance for them. Not everyone will agree with everything that is said. Nevertheless, it deserves much more careful study and reflection. In so many respects it can be viewed, by Christians at least if not by all persons of goodwill, as our guiding document for the foreseeable future.
[The encyclical can be accessed online here.]
Hugh Williams
September 10, 2015
