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Has the Australian Catholic Church heeded the call of Laudato Si’?

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What level of engagement has the Australian Catholic Church had with Pope Francis’s landmark 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’? (Alessandra Benedetti – Corbis / Corbis via Getty Images)

It’s a little over five years since the release of Pope Francis’s landmark encyclical, Laudato Si’: Care for our Common Home. It was clear from the beginning that the Vatican had high hopes for the document, timing its release to influence the UN climate talks later in 2015.

On 2 January 2015, the National Catholic Reporter ran an editorial with the headline, “2015 could be the year we save the earth.” It went on to quote the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, that “2015 could be a decisive year in human history.”

Even before the encyclical’s release, it was being attacked by conservative Catholics, with Christopher Monkton telling the pope, “You demean the office that you hold and you demean the church whom it is your sworn duty to protect and defend and advance.” On the other side of the ledger it was greeted with enthusiasm by the world’s environmentalist, pleased to see the Catholic Church adding its voice to the debate on environmental protection.

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The encyclical itself was quite remarkable. It was the first major document from the Catholic Church on the environment, dealing with a full range of environmental issues — from pollution and climate change, access to clean water, biodiversity, to the quality of human life and the breakdown of society. It provides an analysis that encompasses the personal, cultural, and socio-political aspects of our continued degradation of our common home. The theme that runs through the document is that “everything is interconnected”: our relationships to God, to one another, and to the environment around us.

The two words that most struck me when I first read it were “urgent” and “crisis,” with Pope Francis telling his readers, “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.” But it was also remarkable for the little things one notices as a theologian: his direct quoting of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew; his multiple references to national episcopal conference documents (including Australia and New Zealand); a footnote on a Sufi mystic, included at the direction of the pope himself; and the use of inclusive language in the official Vatican English translation.

To mark the occasion of its fifth anniversary, the Vatican declared 16-23 May 2020 to be “Laudato Si’ Week,” and asked Catholic everywhere to join “in solidarity for a more just and sustainable future.” Pushing things further, Pope Francis has called for a year-long process of engagement with the message of the encyclical, issuing a special prayer for the faithful. But while the Vatican is urging us to move forward, we should also pause to look back to examine what level of uptake the encyclical has had in the Australian Catholic Church. Has the Church taken the document into its heart? Or is it destined to join the largely neglected body of Catholic Social Teaching, often referred to as the Church’s best kept secret?

There are many ways in which we could seek to answer this question. But one fruitful way is to examine how our Catholic Church leaders have drawn on the encyclical in their public talks and homilies. I will focus on the output of the Sydney Catholic archbishop, Anthony Fisher, whose talks and homilies are available on the archdiocesan website, in searchable form. The archbishop assumed office in September 2014, just under a year prior to the release of the encyclical. As a protégé of the previous archbishop, Cardinal George Pell, he shares much the same conservative outlook as his predecessor. Searching his talks, we find the following:

  • speaking at an Iftar Dinner marking the end of Ramadan (17 July 2015), he referred to the encyclical as promoting the value of asceticism;
  • in a paper on “Same-Sex ‘Marriage’: Evolution or Deconstruction of Marriage and The Family?” (22 July 2015), he referred to the encyclical’s brief comments on the issue of gender: “we must accept ourselves in our bodily being, our masculinity and femininity”;
  • in a talk on the then upcoming World Youth Day, “One Year To WYD: Preparing To Receive Mercy” (31 July 2015), he made various direct quotes from the encyclical: “our gadget culture peddles technology and consumer goods as the way to happiness”; he says that “profound interior conversion is needed”; he calls for “new habits” and “little daily actions”;
  • in a paper at the conservative think-tank, Centre for Independent Studies, “Should Bakers be Required to Bake Gay Wedding Cakes?” (14 October 2015), he criticises “the watermelon commentariat” in their reading of the encyclical, mentions the pope’s concern for anthropogenic climate change, but with a footnotes disclaimer from that the pope has no authority of scientific matters, as the encyclical itself acknowledges;
  • commemorating on the feast of St. Josephine Bakhita (February 2018), who was a victim of slavery and is considered the patron saint of the anti-slavery movement, he has a footnote to the encyclical where Pope Francis mentions modern-day slavery;
  • a talk entitled “Business Ethics 101” (March 2018) at the Sydney Catholic Business Network Lunch quotes the encyclical to the effect that business is a “noble vocation”;
  • his homily for Lent and to open the academic year of the Catholic Institute of Sydney (15 March 2020) contains a passing reference but nothing direct.

If this was all that Sydney Catholics heard about Laudato Si’, they might think it promotes personal asceticism and a simple lifestyle, that it is opposed to same-sex marriage and slavery, and that it is pro-business.

A starker picture emerges in a homily on Tuesday 28 October 2019. It is not clear what audience this was intended for, as it seems quite elaborate for just a weekday mass — perhaps it as proximate to one of the student climate strikes — but in it Archbishop Fisher nails his colours to the mast in relation to the environmental movement. He lumps environmentalism together with Marxism, feminism, and human rights advocacy as “all prominent in the secular world,” and calls environmentalism a substitute for religion, verging on pantheism and animism. He has pointed comments about “ecotheologians” and “creation spirituality.” He refers to Greta Thunberg and her “apocalyptic speech” at the United Nations, and seems dismissive of the student strikes she generated.

In this homily, Archbishop Fisher does manage to refer to the encyclical more fulsomely than his other contributions. He notes Pope Francis’s three main concerns: “love for the natural world and its creatures, love for humanity and especially the poor, and love for the Creator of them all. [Pope Francis] calls for a radical rethink of our relationship with all three.” He does mention aspects of the encyclical:

about the poor quality of life common in such cities, with their anonymity and frenetic pace, their broken relationships and lack of inter-generational responsibility; and about wrong attitudes to the natural environment. He critiques the voracious consumerism of the ‘throwaway society’, the naïve belief in unlimited material progress, the perils of the technological imperative.

What the Archbishop seems never to have referred to are the multiple specifics Francis identifies in his encyclical: pollution, climate change, water quality, biodiversity, global inequality, and poverty-driving degradation. We don’t get the sense of anguish felt by the pope in his call that we listen to the “cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” We don’t find any sense of outrage at the way our political systems have been distorted by commercial demands (no doubt, by some good Catholic businessmen and politicians too). We don’t get the sense of urgency that pervades the document as it calls for an ecological conversion, demanding that care for the earth “is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.” This urgency is most evident in Pope Francis’s demands in relation to our over-reliance on fossil fuels:

yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity. … The problem is aggravated by a model of development based on the intensive use of fossil fuels, which is at the heart of the worldwide energy system.

And again:

There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy.

And again, just in case we missed it:

We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels — especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas — needs to be progressively replaced without delay. Until greater progress is made in developing widely accessible sources of renewable energy, it is legitimate to choose the lesser of two evils or to find short-term solutions.

The pope backs up this concern with a call for strong international action on carbon emissions:

Enforceable international agreements are urgently needed, since local authorities are not always capable of effective intervention. Relations between states must be respectful of each other’s sovereignty, but must also lay down mutually agreed means of averting regional disasters which would eventually affect everyone. Global regulatory norms are needed to impose obligations and prevent unacceptable actions, for example, when powerful companies dump contaminated waste or offshore polluting industries in other countries.

These are concerns that are most pressing in Australia, as one of the world’s largest exporters of coal and natural gas, both of which are major contributors to global warming. We are also a country where the coal and gas extraction industries exercise inordinate influence on the political processes, making sensible climate policies almost impossible to achieve. It is not good enough to brush aside such concerns — as Archbishop Fisher does by noting that the pope has no authority to speak on scientific matters — when they are concerns shared by many Australians, not because they have been duped by environmentalists, but because of the overwhelming scientific evidence.

Perhaps more troubling than this lack of interest in the specifics of the encyclical is the inversion of its stance towards the world. Archbishop Fisher is assiduously digging a moat between the Church and the “secular world” — full of environmentalist, feminists, Marxists, and capitalists — while Pope Francis is building bridges, acting as a pontifex between the Church and the world. He praises the efforts of environmental groups, their “admirable creativity and generosity.” He urges “non-governmental organizations and intermediate groups, [to] put pressure on governments to develop more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls” in relation to pollution, while these same groups “are also entrusted with helping to raise people’s awareness” in relation to the environment. So he writes:

Society is also enriched by a countless array of organizations which work to promote the common good and to defend the environment, whether natural or urban. Some, for example, show concern for a public place … and strive to protect, restore, improve or beautify it as something belonging to everyone. Around these community actions, relationships develop or are recovered and a new social fabric emerges.

Such language foreshadows a new alliance between the religious communities and the environmental movement, not a deepening of hostilities.

This openness was evident at the conference to launch of the encyclical, where two of the speakers were Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (an atheist physicist turned climate scientist) and Naomi Klein (a self-proclaimed secular Jewish feminist). Klein repaid the complement when she told a packed Opera House concert hall at the 2015 Festival of Dangerous Ideas that “everyone should read this document” — referring to Laudato Si’ — which she went on to describe in glowing terms. The encyclical has offered the Church an astounding opportunity to evangelise many of those in society who are estranged from the Gospel. This has been my experience, too. When my wife Thea, a climate change activist, and I were addressing at a conference organised by the University of Tasmania, we were the only speakers presenting a religious perspective. I asked how many of the participants had read the encyclical, and was delighted to discover that around half of this largely secular audience had — far more than most Catholics.

It would be wrong to single out Sydney, but the archdiocese does provide interesting data. In comparison, Brisbane’s and Perth’s websites are replete with references to the encyclical; Canberra and Goulburn and Adelaide have only a handful; while, perhaps predictably, Hobart has none (either that, or the search function does not work). Moreover, Sydney seemed to return only references from the Archbishop’s speeches and homilies, while the others were more inclusive of archdiocesan activities. Finally, Melbourne’s website does not provide a search function, so it is difficult to gauge where it stands. However, on this basis one might conclude that while the archdioceses of Brisbane and Perth have responded more fully to the encyclical, while the others have been muted at best — at least, as far as their public presence on the web is concerned.

I noted at the outset that the Vatican hoped that Laudato Si’ would mark a turning point in our ongoing destruction of the natural environment. Pope Francis has now called for the Church to observe a year of engagement with the encyclical, promoting its teachings and embedding its call in our daily lives. On present indications, the leadership of the Catholic Church in Australia still has a long way to go to make that happen.

Neil Ormerod is a widely published theologian and a Fellow of the Australian Catholic Theological Association. He is a retired Professor of Theology at Australian Catholic University.

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