Two cheers for Laudate Deum, the musings of a ‘1960s flower child’ that falls short on theology

On the Feast of St Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis promulgated his Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum, expressly to complement his 2015 Encyclical, Laudato Si’.

(Holly blue butterfly on fleabane by Simon Caldwell)

Ken Craycraft

October 5, 2023 at 5:37 am

The encyclical was Francis’s admonition to address climate change. Laudate Deum is his much briefer complaint that we have not adequately heeded the charge of Laudato Si’. While he warns the Church that “certain apocalyptic diagnoses [are] scarcely reasonable”, this does not excuse us from taking responsible measures to care for the environment. “The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point”. Indeed, “the situation is now even more pressing”.

Both in 2015 and 2023, the Holy Father has identified authentic crises and suggested valid theological principles for addressing them. I do not gainsay the empirical data he adduces or the implications he draws therefrom. Thermometers, barometers, and wind gauges do not lie. And the Pope should be credited for avoiding reductionist causal conclusions. “Admittedly, not every concrete catastrophe ought to be attributed to global climate change”, he rightly notes. Economic and political factors, having nothing to do with climate change, are responsible for many global calamities, including those related to poverty, migration, and refugee crises. 

Moreover, Francis does not deny that long-term cyclical climate change must also be considered. That does not, however, excuse us from recognising more immediate impacts on climate change and thus from taking more direct measures to address its more proximate causes. And I applaud the Holy Father for his strong invocation of the social doctrine of solidarity, in declaring that environmental concerns are global and thus require international cooperation. “[W]hat happens in one part of the world has repercussions on the entire planet” he observes. “Everything is connected.” Thus, the Pope is quite correct to admonish “all people of good will” properly to care for the earth and its inhabitants. 

Thus, I give two cheers for Laudate Deum. I withhold a third, however, for two reasons.

First, Pope Francis seems to think that the entire panacea for climate change, and thus the sole principle of sound ecological stewardship, is for highly developed economies to consume less. He summarises this attitude in the penultimate paragraph: “If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact”.

Of course, this completely ignores the correlation of emissions to the manufacturing and distribution of the goods. In many cases, “emissions per individual” are a measure of efficiency and development rather than consumption and waste.  It is the sort of reductionist assertion that gives ammunition to Pope Francis’s critics. 

Second, the Holy Father does not address the theological problem at the heart of the crises of stewardship and conservation. The modern reduction of teleologically oriented science to utilitarian technology is all but ignored. This is all the more disappointing in light of a division of the exhortation entitled “A Growing Technocratic Paradigm”. This section might have called for a reorientation of humankind to its proper ends of rest in God and communion with one another. It could have been a vigorous defence of the purposiveness of creation as ordered toward the good of man, and of man as ordered toward God. The Pope might have condemned the fundamental rejection of any supernatural purpose to nature, and thus identified the actual theological causes of all manner of environmental, industrial, economic, and political maladies.

Alas, he whiffs on this opportunity. Instead, the section on the “technocratic paradigm” offers a utilitarian solution to a problem caused by a utilitarian philosophical shift. To be sure, Francis acutely calls us to acknowledge that “our power” may be “turning against us”. And he repeats his lament from Laudato Si’ that “we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint”. But he offers no hint of a solution other than in the very terms that have divorced the power of technology from the purpose toward which it should be ordered. Indeed, the word “order” does not appear in the exhortation in the sense of proper orientation or end. He prefers “development” to “telos” (which does not appear in any form). 

Even in the only (very short) specifically religious section of the exhortation, subtitled “Spiritual Motivations”, Pope Francis misses the opportunity to discuss the fundamental disorientation of man from God. Tacked on to the end almost as an afterthought, it could have been written by a 1960s flower child. The Pope identifies “the delicate equilibria existing between creatures of the world”, but he does not identify the cause of that imbalance. He ends the exhortation with the wonderful observation, “when human beings claim to take God’s place, they become their own worst enemies”. But he utterly fails to develop that conclusion in the pages that precede it. The environmental crisis is a theological crisis. You would not know that from reading Laudate Deum.

https://catholicherald.co.uk/two-cheers-for-laudate-deum-the-musings-of-a-1960s-flower-child-that-is-short-on-theology/