More Than a Sequel

Source: More Than a Sequel

Edward Tverdek, OFMis a Catholic priest living and ministering at St. Peter’s Church in downtown Chicago. He is the author ofThe Moral Weight of Ecology [15] (Lexington, 2015).

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Pope Francis’s much-heralded apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum [2] arrived in October on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, a bit more than eight years after the publication of his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ [3] and in the final quarter of the planet’s warmest year on record. The texts reach a similar audience and are ostensibly about the same topic: our duty to care for God’s creation amid a climate crisis caused by the historical lack of such care. It is a bit of a “sequel,” no doubt, and the pontiff quotes extensively from his own earlier work to reiterate numerous points. But it’s not, as many anticipated, a simple admonition to act on the call of Laudato si’. Yes, the pope concedes “that our responses have not been adequate”; that “the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point”; and that the clean-energy transition “is not progressing at the necessary speed.” But Francis is not speaking as a frustrated parent telling their child, “I told you to clean your room days ago; now look at this mess.”

For one thing, the pope acknowledges, if only implicitly, that he too may have underestimated the urgency of the situation in Laudato si’: “we are presently experiencing…an unusual acceleration of warming,” he writes, “at such a speed that it will take only one generation—not centuries or millennia—in order to verify it.” Things are, it seems, moving faster and more perilously than even Pope Francis himself imagined in 2015. What’s more, new threats that weren’t at the forefront of concern in 2015, including pandemics and runaway generative artificial intelligence, threaten to exacerbate the human and environmental crisis. And, perhaps most importantly, the approach governments, corporations, and international bodies have taken to solve the climate crisis is proving ineffective. In other words, the crisis, as Pope Francis sees it today, is of a different character than it was in 2015. It requires an even more urgent response, to be sure, but also a more nuanced one, attuned to the failures of the intervening years.