“Make yourself at home” – we might say to a friend who is a guest at our house. Planet Earth is, as the sub-title of the Pope’s new encyclical calls it, the ‘common home’ for humanity. And it’s a home that is increasingly falling into disrepair, due to lack of care by the tenants to whom it has been entrusted.
There’s been much theological debate about the precise mandate given by God to humans at the beginning of the book of Genesis. But I’d take “make yourselves at home” as a rough paraphrase of what God says to Adam and Eve back then. However, what sort of home are we currently making for ourselves and generations to come, and for the other species with which we share this planet? After all, the story of Noah indicates that bio-diversity matters to God. And let’s remember that Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose ‘Francis’ as his papal name – after Saint Francis who celebrated nature in his teaching and his songs.
Echoing the ‘common home’ in its title, the ‘common good’ is a persistent theme through the encyclical. The common good builds on an extensive library of Catholic social teaching, going back through Aquinas and Augustine (whom I studied for my Masters degree in theology at Edinburgh) to the early days of the Christian church. The encyclical develops and applies this already well-established theology to the more recently emerged common challenge of climate change and the rapidly increasing loss of biodiversity and of the ecosystems that support life on earth.
Notably, the encyclical is addressed to all people of goodwill, not just Catholics; and the ‘common good’ is not restricted to the Catholic tradition. For example, the protestant activist and theologian Jim Wallis has been championing the case for using the ‘common good’ to guide Christian engagement in politics and community life, captured in his book, ‘(Un)Common Good: How the Gospel Brings Hope to a World Divided’ (2014).