For once, we have a churchman who accuses the secular world of dragging us all back to the Middle Ages. For a certain kind of modernist (the groan-inducing kind), to accuse the Catholic Church of medievalism is a tired gambit. But it’s refreshing to hear a Pope amiably return the compliment.
Granted, Pope Francis never explicitly makes the accusation in his new encyclical, Laudato Si’. But it is what really informs the document. Although it’s been widely characterised as being about climate change, it’s actually about the everyday routine violence in the world – violence against other human beings and violence against nature. It takes place, he says, with our complicity.
Francis is radical but, as always, his radicalism is part of a tradition. This encyclical has clear roots in predecessors like Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967) and Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963).
Pacem in Terris articulated a Christian stand on human rights; Populorum Progressio, a Christian stand on economic development and international solidarity. You could say that Francis updates both for a world in full-blown ecological crisis.
He offers an ethic for human care of other beings: a spirit of noblesse oblige, if you like, towards animals and flowers. He speaks to an age where the destructive threat lies not just in the splitting of atoms (treated in Pacem in Terris) but also in the splicing of genes.
Above all, he draws a link between everyday actions in the consumerist world and the more powerful drivers of global ecological disruption. The most important symptom is climate change but it is driven by the international and corporate race to capture control of scarce natural resources, with the consequent disruption of peace and order in many human communities.
In their own demented way, the US conservatives who are comparing Francis to Paul VI have nailed the essence of the encyclical. They complain that Francis has been hoodwinked by rogue scientists (that is, virtually all of them) in the same way that (they say) Paul VI was hoodwinked by the Club of Rome, with its 1960s-style rhetoric of overpopulation and scarce food resources. The ecological crisis predicted for the 1970s, the conservatives say, never happened and, likewise, climate change is nothing that mitigating technology cannot handle.
Actually, the crisis predicted 50 years ago did unfold – but not quite in the way that was predicted (which fundamental crisis or battle ever does?). Likewise, although we can predict the crisis caused by climate change, it would be foolish to think we can predict the precise social outline of the way it will unfold. As with any revolution, the break it will impose on our style of life will be so radical that it is difficult to imagine.
It is the very unpredictability that makes Francis’s prescriptions so valuable. He is urging the cultivation of an ethic of responsibility, a disposition of sobriety and humility that can deal with whatever the future throws at us. It is a shared ethic of care and responsibility that will leave us open-minded enough to assess, as we go along, what technological opportunities should be embraced and which should be given up.
It’s actually about the everyday routine violence in the world – violence against other human beings and violence against nature
Francis has urged restrained consumption and making less of a fetish of economic growth. In uproar, the US conservatives have attempted to patronise Francis by saying that he does not understand the link between the economy, freedom and ecological conservation.
He just does not get, they say, that it’s the most developed economies, like the US, that have the best ecological conservation practices.
Whereas it’s countries like his that have worse economic performance and environmental conservation.
It’s certainly true that the US has some of the most environmentally-sensitive laws within its jurisdiction. But maybe it’s because he’s Latin American that the Pope recognises that some of the affluence of richer countries is based on the squalor of others.
In global terms, the carbon footprint of an innocent US child is 20 times greater than that of a child born in a low-income country. The carbon footprint of one is at the expense of the other.
With the super-rich, having their own private means of air transport and yachts and their huge multiple estates, the disjunction between their footprint and those of the rest is even greater.
As an Argentine, Jorge Bergoglio probably recognises where he has seen all of this before: in the authoritarian, neo-feudal recent past of his own country, where the privileged could live in their enclaves of affluence, liberty and personal rights… financed by their de facto control of the food-producing poorer regions.
As a churchman with a great interest in St Francis, he would also know that the Middle Ages were a time of great innovative economic ferment. Urbanisation was spreading as were new trade routes. Financial and intellectual innovation – like double-entry book-keeping and the sprouting of universities – marked the times. A new middle class emerged.
But the new cities went hand in hand with a new barbarism. It was easier to steal natural resources with the power of the sword than to make the necessary social innovations to share and make wealth more equitably.
Elites ate comfortably; they never suffered a famine, unlike their subjects (variable nutrition explains why the aristocracy tended to be taller and healthier than the peasants). They lived and travelled escorted by armed security personnel. They did not necessarily speak the language of the people they ruled over. Reaction set in, among other ways, with the rise of new religious sects having apocalyptic world views.
The spiritual career of Francis of Assisi developed in just such a context. I suspect that Pope Francis is so fond of him because he reads our world as having a great affinity with his: the urbanisation; the new financial possibilities; the new commodities; the new knowledge, a new global middle class… but also the new cosmopolitan elite, the gated communities, the land grabs, the armed entourages around the rich and famous, the apocalyptic fundamentalisms…
It is a world that – for all its rhetoric about the market and economy – has violence at its heart: from the violence of indifference to the invisible poor to the visible violence perpetrated – whether by drones or guns sold from the world’s economic centres – in the peripheries by the troops of ruling order and outlaw militias.
For Christians, especially, there is one salient point in the Pope’s choice of St Francis as an icon. The Holy Father, in emphasising a new sobriety and simplicity, is not advocating a new austerity and sour-faced utilitarianism.
St Francis is known best for his self-imposed radical poverty. But the Pope also cites the saint’s philosophy of wealth; his urging that all the gardens of the Franciscan Order be divided into three: a third to grow food and medicinal herbs; a third to grow flowers; and a third let to grow wild, to symbolise the ravishing wildness that lies in wait in all of nature.
As the Church in Malta ponders how best to make the new encyclical its own, it should remember that the Pope is urging Christians to respond to the new Middle Ages with a mission dedicated to beauty as much as simplicity.
ranierfsadni@europe.com