POPE FRANCIS MADE history eight years ago when he became the first pope to publish an encyclical focused on the environment and our collective responsibility to end the poisoning of our planet. Unlike most such documents that stir debates largely confined to theological circles, “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home” sparked a global reaction far beyond the Catholic Church.
In October, the pope again pulled our attention back to a worsening climate crisis and even more dire threats to our common home with the release of “Laudate Deum” (“Praise God”), which comes at a time when mounting evidence of more frequent climate emergencies has been met most often with apathy, not action.
“I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” the pope writes. There are good reasons for the pope’s stark assessment. The burning of fossil fuels continues to reap obscene profits for oil executives while the impact of human-induced climate change, especially on impoverished nations, is devastating. Pope Francis laments that “the necessary transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed.” The publication was timed for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) taking place in November and December.
I’m particularly encouraged by the pope’s support for activists and grassroots organizers who have far outpaced most political leaders when it comes to mobilizing for climate justice. Francis endorses “a multilateralism ‘from below.’” While right-wing demagogues who fancy themselves populists exploit fears of cultural displacement and economic anxiety, the pope’s hopeful populism is rooted in standing in solidarity with the poor, bringing people together across divides, and challenging structures of injustice that prop up immoral systems.
The pope’s latest exhortation highlights a core theme addressed in “Laudato Si’,” which took on even greater resonance in 2020. “[T]he Covid-19 pandemic brought out the close relation of human life with that of other living beings and with the natural environment,” Francis writes. “But in a special way, it confirmed that what happens in one part of the world has repercussions on the entire planet. This allows me to reiterate two convictions that I repeat over and over again: ‘Everything is connected’ and ‘No one is saved alone.’” It can’t be overstated how much this view, rooted in Catholic social teaching about the common good, challenges a certain American idolatry of individualism and uncritical faith in free-market fundamentalism. Libertarianism, in both its market expressions and cultural orientation, is ill-equipped to respond to shared challenges such as climate change and pandemics that don’t stop at national borders.
THE POPE IS also blunt about the ways reactionary ideologies, misinformation, and denial of human-induced climate change skew perceptions and impede progress. “Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over, or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident,” he writes. The greed of wealthy nations, Francis emphasizes, can breed cavalier attitudes and self-justifying rationales for denying threats to the environment. “Regrettably, the climate crisis is not exactly a matter that interests the great economic powers, whose concern is with the greatest profit possible at minimal cost and in the shortest amount of time,” he says. The pope specifically references the United States when he argues that “a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact.” He names “certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church,” as obstacles to change. Pope Francis has identified vocal conservative Catholics in the U.S. as some of the most persistent critics of his papacy. Last summer, he made headlines for calling out “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” in the U.S. Catholic Church. “I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless,” he told a group of Jesuits in Portugal.
As a reporter, I’ve covered enough conservative Catholic conferences in the United States to see how reactionary attitudes dismiss and deny climate change as a pro-life issue. After “Laudate Deum” was released, Jay W. Richards, who directs the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the conservative and libertarian Heritage Foundation, commented on X (formerly Twitter) that “the pope has no particular insight or authority when it comes to the many questions related to climate change, and his published views on the science are easy to dispute, and, in some cases, just wrong.” Richards is a former research professor at the Catholic University of America’s business school, which over the years has received more than $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation. At a $2,500-a-ticket conference hosted by the business school in 2017, as I’ve reported elsewhere, Koch railed against government efforts to regulate corporations and the market but was never asked about Koch Industries’ long history of covering up toxic spills and his underwriting of well-funded climate disinformation campaigns.
A 2022 PEW Research Center survey found that 82 percent of Catholics who are Democrats say global climate change is a serious problem. Only a quarter of Republican Catholics agree. And while 71 percent of Hispanic Catholics view climate change as a serious challenge, only 49 percent of white, non-Hispanic Catholics agree. (The survey lacked sufficient data from Black and Asian Catholics.) Preaching to the progressive choir on climate change won’t move the political needle in Washington. Who can reach white Republican Catholics? What messages will break through partisan media echo chambers? There aren’t quick or easy answers to those questions, but Catholic leaders can play a role in appealing to more conservative voters.
Most Catholic pro-life activists who mobilized for decades to end Roe v. Wade have shown little urgency to lead on climate issues. There are consequences to this inaction. As an editorial in America magazine noted, “climate change has failed to penetrate the moral imagination of Catholics in the way that other pro-life issues have.”
When I’m most discouraged about how the dysfunctional state of American politics impedes our ability to tackle the existential challenge of climate change, I draw inspiration from my own experiences with what the pope has on past occasions called the “social poets” of “popular movements.” As a writer and advocate based in Washington, D.C., I have witnessed faith-based organizers reframe contentious public debates about immigration, poverty, war, and climate change away from predictable partisan talking points toward moral imperatives. Young people at the forefront of climate activism — many of them inspired by faith — are examples of social poets who teach us with creativity and fierce urgency. I hope they see in “Laudate Deum” another sign that Pope Francis has their back. As the pope told a gathering of youth climate activists from more than 190 countries in 2021: “It is said that you are the future, but in these matters, you are the present. You are those who are making the future today.”
John Gehring is the author of The Francis Effect: A Radical Pope’s Challenge to the American Catholic Church.
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