More About Laudato Si’
I’m still working my way through Laudato Si’, but in the meantime, here are some more great analyses:
The Terrible Problem with Laudato Si’
The difficulty, the dreadful, unspeakable, shield-your-eyes difficulty with the Pope’s new encyclical on the environment comes down to one nasty problem: The man is right.
For the popular press, hoping all this time that Pope Francis would be something new and different, created in the image of The Today Show, there’s an unavoidable reckoning. Dammit, Jim, the Pope really is Catholic. See if you can book Honey Boo Boo or something.
For Catholics it’s even worse. The man has gone and summed up the entirety of Catholic social teaching, folding in Rerum Novarum and Humanae Vitae and the Church Fathers and everything, and then done the unthinkable and pointed out that this actually requires us to change the way we live. Christianity is something more than a Jesus-flavored quest for the American Dream.
Fourteen Things Laudato Si Says. Nine Things It Does Not Say.
Laudato Si has a simple underlying argument. Pope Francis reasons that our spiritual bankruptcy has led us into destroying our earth, along with destroying ourselves. He teaches that the loss of respect for the human through our attacks on the sanctity of human life have led us into an extreme individualism that has in turn led us to a destructive relativism.
The Pope’s Encyclical, at Heart, Is about Us, Not Trees and Snail Darters
That Trinitarian and Biblical understanding of How Things Came to Be underwrites Pope Francis’s critique of the diminished and distorted forms of human self-understanding that are inadequate to the task of facilitating our participation in God’s ongoing creativity.
Prominent among these is the ancient, Promethean temptation to displace the divinely created order — which takes its modern form in the tendency of 21st-century science and technology to bracket questions of right and wrong, “ought” and “ought not,” in order to concentrate on issues of technique and technology. Technique and technology are not problems in themselves. The problem comes when they fill humanity’s intellectual horizon and moral imagination to the exclusion of all other considerations.
The first encyclical wholly from Francis overturns expectations
Laudato si‘ is not only an example of the Magisterium’s social teaching: it also represents the birth of a new literary genre among papal documents.
Normally in the modern epoch, Popes have included in encyclicals doctrinal themes. But ‘Laudato si’ is not a doctrinal text — it is rather a pastoral letter based on the classical Latin American method: see, judge, act.
Finally, there’s Father Barron’s initial take.
