Laudato Si'

Laudato Si'' by Pope Francis, 177 pages

Promulgated on the Feast of Pentecost this past May, Laudato Si' is Pope Francis' encyclical "On Care of Our Common Home", the Earth.  The title is, as is customary with papal pronouncements, taken from the first words of the document (usually Latin, in this case Italian), "Laudato Si', mi' Signore" - "Praise be to You, my Lord", a passage from "The Canticle of the Sun" written by the Pope's namesake, St Francis of Assisi, a celebration of the greatness of God and the kinship of all created things.

St Francis is sometimes deformed by ignorance or ideology into a free-spirited pantheist, and Laudato Si' can be oversimplified into an environmental manifesto or an "encyclical on global warming".  "The Canticle of the Sun" climaxes with a celebration of divine mercy and justice as the crowning features of providential Creation, which includes the reality of "Sister Death" alongside "Brother Sun" and "Sister Moon".  Laudato Si' is a call for a turn towards the nature of things - against a utilitarian focus on technique and the manipulation of reality, and towards a renewed respect for Creation as it is given to us.  This does not mean rejecting any sort of improvement of nature - to the contrary, productive labor is a fundamental need of man, a necessity of his nature.  What it does mean is ceasing to view the world as a neutral, passive object, and beginning to recognize the essences and ends of natural things, using them respectfully, instead of according to our own insatiable appetites.