LAUDATO SI @10

 

 

 

LAUDATO SI’ @10

This year we are celebrating ten years of Laudato Si, the encyclical Pope Francis has left for us, that deals with the care of the common home. To understand this encyclical, we have to put it in the cultural and political context and on the other hand an authoritarian contribution to the Catholic social teachings (CST) that helps the readers to refreshingly enter into the spirituality and theological vision of Catholicism that brings in the integral vision of ecology, social, cultural and political overviews.

Pope Francis reminds us that nature is good and beautiful but we humans are monsters causing pollution of the environment. We can see this by the destruction of natural inhabitants that has brought about the extinction of the species. Perhaps the world would be better off without us. Man has become a puzzle to himself. We are not God; God gave man domination over creation that man has to understand it not as a power to dominate but as a special kind of responsibility.

The whole church and those who are committed to the pursuit of ecological justice. We are called upon to defend creation from attack and to respect nature by all including the non-Catholics. The respect we give is that which applies to all creatures. Pope Francis taught us to rest, to contemplate, drink deep at the wellsprings of the spirit who is present, as an inextinguishable joy at the heart of creation.

We are to get back to the practice of saying grace before meals, not just mere routine of cultivating a deep sensitivity to God’s gift. All of us are interconnected, cobwebbed through personal experiences that has to be built on a spiritual exercise rather than a lecture. Pope Francis kept telling us that realities are more important than ideas. We need to see with our eyes to see what is happening by imparting a spirituality, a transformative pedagogy to prayerful life.

Laudato Si’ as Pope Francis kept on insisting is that it qualifies his theology as ‘pastoral’ and not meant in any sense of weakening or being ‘soft’ on church teaching by providing excuses, but ‘pastoral’ is used in the sense asserted by Karl Rahner that ‘all theology is pastoral’, that it concerns the lives of real people in real situations, a craft obviously mastered by Pope Francis. For Francis the issues of ecology and environment are treated in a way that integrates them into the larger framework of issues about evangelization at the beginning of the third millennium. Francis looked at this from the reality through a wide-angle lens so that ecology and evangelization, the environment and poverty, the teaching of the Catholic church about the economy and deforestation, for example, are all of a piece. Francis came from somewhere, the Aparecida context of reality that talks of holiness in a surprising way which we get a hint by quoting from the document. “In sharing this mission the disciples journey towards holiness. Living it in mission leads them into the heart of the world. Hence, holiness is not a flight toward self-absorption or toward religious individualism, nor does it mean abandoning the urgent reality of the enormous economic, social and political problems of Latin America and the world, let alone a flight from reality toward an exclusively spiritual world.”

Pope Francis argues as an integral ecology in the On Care for Our Common Home, has its precedents in such passages as the following: “There are other weak and defenseless beings who frequently at the mercy of economic interests or indiscriminate exploitation. I am speaking of creation as a whole. We human beings are not only the beneficiaries but also the stewards of other creatures. Thanks to our bodies, God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement. Let us not leave in our wake a swath of destruction and death which will affect our own lives and those of future generations…” (after which follows an extensive quote about this reality from the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines’s Pastoral Letter What is happening in our Beautiful Land? (29 January 1988).

Repeatedly in Laudato Si’ Pope Francis echoes the sentiments of John XXIII, whose encyclical Pacem in Terris was addressed to all people of good will. So Laudato Si’. In addition, the pope repeatedly calls for dialogue on this important issue on as broad a range as possible. The task is large, the parameters are wide, our challenge is crucial, our opportunity here is, I judge, once in a life time. Is there any wonder why People Francis announced a Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region, which took place in October 2019? He asked that the new saints intercede for this ecclesial event, that, in respect for the beauty of creation, all the people of the earth might praise God, Lord of the universe and so be enlightened by him to follow the paths of justice and peace.