Laudato Si’

Pope Francis’ new encyclical on ecology and the environment was published this morning, and already my RSS feeds and inbox are filling up with those praising it, criticizing it, or just plain analyzing it.

I will begin reading it at lunch, but I’ve no hope of finishing it for a while.

You can download a copy from the Vatican web site.

Paperback and hardcover copies are winging their way to bookstores now.

I’m doing me best to ignore those with a political axe to grind. Here are some of the better articles I’ve read so far:

Laudato Si is Pope Francis’ Rerum Novarum, or No Wonder Rush Limbaugh Hates the Pope

Both the right wing and the left wing of our political spectrum want the Church to shut up and go along where their particular sins are concerned. They both claim, each with their own language, that when it comes to their sins, Jesus Christ is irrelevant.

They are both self-serving liars.

11 Things You Probably Won’t Hear about Pope Francis’ Encyclical

While much of the media focus will be on the sections devoted to climate change and global warming, here are eleven things from the encyclical you probably won’t see in the headlines.

Praise be to you, Lord (by Archbishop Chaput)

For the Holy Father, a humane ecology includes much more than our treatment of the material world. It involves our bodies, our sexuality and our personhood as well.

There’s a line in The Lord of the Rings that’s worth remembering here:

“[It] is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those that live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”