READING TOGETHER THE LETTER OF LAUDATO SI
By Don. Joseph Baptist Nyamunga, SSA
Laudato Si’, (English: Praise Be to You) is the second encyclical of Pope Francis. The encyclical has the subtitle “on the care for our common home”. As its name implies a circular letter meant to be spread throughout a community. It gives us the impression that it has not yet reached to all sectors because the environmental crisis seems to escalate. There is no longer praise but lamentation hence taking the negative form from Laudato Si’ to Non Sia Laudato. (English: Don’t be praised). We find ourselves in the same dilemma, crises and challenges of taking care of our common home. Laudato Si’ manifests itself as an act of giving praise to God for His creation and His magnificent presence and manifestation to human beings. But from the lived experience, today it is completely contrary to what Praise Be to You is all about. If we to take seriously our call in this common home, we would not be talking of environmental crisis in the first place.
If decisions were reached, commitments made, and resolutions arrived at in as far as care of the common home is concerned, we would have no any other option except to live up to our duties and obligations of taking care of our common home. If these decisions to take care of the mother earth are anything to go by, we would be having a change of mentality, new paradigm shift, new leitmotif, and great strands in environmental care and protection.
Pope Francis is giving us the blue-print, designed road plan with all road signs clearly signalized on this super highway and we are to drive as per for the speed limits prescribed in given by-laws. If the teachings are right, admonitions just, discernment processes fully fine-tuned and the signs of the times interpreted well, then can all say (Praise Be to You). Laudato Si’ is about building up a philosophy, doctrine, a system thinking where all members of this common home become protagonists of desired change. As the Spanish saying states: “La basura tiene su lugar” (English: Rubbish has got its place… a place for everything and everything in its place).
If we are a Church, we have to read Laudato Si’ so as to refreshingly sink into its experience with Pope Francis in his invitation to start discerning seriously. We know what ought to be done, so we must do it right. The Church has published many documents, encyclicals, books, church liturgical materials in volumes. But little have we engaged ourselves into entering into the heart of the environmental crisis affecting our common home. All the above mentioned materials are by-products of trees, paper!!! Little have we dared to question or fully swung into rescue mode of tree planting campaigns as church agents. Trees are being cut unabated, books and documents are being published but little do we ask where this stationery paper in publishing houses come from?
Change begins when we stop and question our way of doing things in the family, community and Church. Once our conscientious is re-awakened in every member of this common home, then the ripple effects will multiply the strong currents that will cause great impacts in paradigm shifts, leitmotivs and right discernment processes. These multifaceted changes have to be confronted with multi-cultural interpretation of crisis.
In this research we are building on care of creation as our mother earth, a call that goes beyond obligations but delve into sense of responsibility and respect to nature and neighbor. It is sinful if we fail to take care of creation and our common home.
We are called upon to start a new pedagogy of love and care of creation, to re-learn, to re-live, to re-educate our attitudes to know the responsibility that the Lord has entrusted to us. Laudato Si’ is an encyclical that helps us to enter into the heart of the problem, crisis, not looking at the problem at the phase level but to start asking ourselves the fundamental questions that create difference, new lifestyles, mental revolution. Our common home is an open space, a house of God, a home that carries everyone and all who live in this common home should take the sense of belonging seriously.
As evangelization agents, we are called upon to encourage and promote interdisciplinary attitudes of respect, protection and defense of the common home, through experience of observation, inquiry and experimentation that build us into global systems, grounded on local and universal wisdom and knowledge that generate healthy habits in the family and community. In our research we are going to treat different approaches, paradigms and leitmotivs as far us our mother Earth is concerned and as we get into dealing with the care of our common home. In chapter one, we shall deal with Laudato Si’ The Care of Creation. Then in chapter two we will delve into Building our Common Home (The Kenyan Context) into environmental degradation, then in chapter three we will be grounded into the Culture of Integral Ecological Education.
Wishing you a good reading and lets journey together through the encyclical and create new paradigm shifts in our way of looking at the environment. You are either part of the problem or part of the solution.
