Laudato Si'

The title comes from the opening line of the Canticle of the Creatures of Francis of Assisi, praise be to you, my Lord, and the choice signals the argument. Creation in this document is not raw material awaiting use but a shared home with its own standing.

Two features distinguish it from its predecessors. The first is the addressee. Papal encyclicals are normally directed to bishops, clergy and the faithful. This one is addressed to every person living on this planet, which is a deliberate widening and was noticed as such. The second is the method. The text works through a long descriptive section on pollution, waste, water, biodiversity, urban decay and inequality before it reaches theology, and in that section it accepts the scientific consensus that a very solid consensus indicates a disturbing warming of the climatic system driven largely by human activity.

From there the argument turns. What it calls the technocratic paradigm, the habit of approaching every problem as an object to be mastered by technique, is presented as the root of both the environmental crisis and the treatment of the poor as surplus. Against it the encyclical proposes an integral ecology, in which environmental, economic, social and cultural questions cannot be separated, and a claim that runs through the whole text: there are not two crises, one environmental and one social, but one complex crisis which is both.

The encyclical was released on 18 June 2015 under the date of 24 May, five months before the United Nations climate conference in Paris, and the timing was not accidental. It was quoted extensively in the run up to that meeting, by delegations and by campaigners, and it gave religious bodies outside the Catholic Church a text to respond to. Orthodox, Anglican, Muslim and Jewish statements on the environment followed and several cite it directly.

It also drew sharp criticism, and the criticism split along two lines. Some argued that the scientific and economic sections lie outside the competence of the papal office and bind no one, a claim the encyclical partly anticipates by distinguishing what it teaches from the empirical judgements it relies on. Others, particularly in the United States, read its treatment of markets and of carbon trading as an intervention in policy rather than in morals.

Within Catholic institutional life its effects are measurable. Dioceses, religious orders and universities adopted divestment and energy policies with the document as their warrant, and in 2021 the Vatican launched a seven year Laudato Si' Action Platform to organise that work. Francis returned to the subject in 2023 with the apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, which he presented as an update because, in his own assessment, the responses since 2015 had not been adequate.