Pope’s Francis’s first encyclical is a shout out to save the environment—and make a priority of theology over politics.
“The majority of people living on our planet profess to be believers.” It is a statement of fact, an intellectual premise, a gentle claim of territory. In his new encyclical on environmental degradation, Laudato Si, Pope Francis is not just addressing the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. He’s tagging God into the global conversation on climate change.
Humans ruined the earth, the pope says, but sin ruined humans. “The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life,” he writes. “The ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion.”
“Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate,” Francis writes. “At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of ‘reproductive health.’
