Without getting rid of the causes we will not be able to get rid of the symptoms. The causes have been created by humans for the glory of humans but turned out to be anti-human. This is the most important message of Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Sì. On the Care of Our Common Home. Media coverage was unfortunately both very selective about the ailments that afflict Mother Earth and parsimonious about Francis’s take on the real cause of these ailments; thus audiences were not always well informed.

In Laudato Sì one finds a lot about the ailments. Francis takes a holistic approach so much so that the encyclical’s underpinning is the phrase “everything is connected”.

Mother Earth’s problems include the degradation of the physical, cultural, political, economic and social environment. Yes, the encyclical is not just about the physical environment or climate change.

Climate change features prominently as it sets the stage for the Pope’s autumn visit to the US and for the Paris summit at the end of the year. The Pope strongly supports those who say that human intervention is responsible for climate change and states that the effects will be disastrous if drastic action is not taken and taken quickly.

But the most important contribution of the encyclical letter is not the section on climate change, important as it is, but his identification of the philosophical/cultural roots of the current crisis of humanity of which climate change is just one facet. Francis, in line with his predecessors, says that this crisis has three heads.

The first is “the omnipresent technocratic paradigm”, a result of which humans in actual fact surrender to technology which is “viewed as the principal key to the meaning of existence”. Another cause is the misguided anthropocentrism that exalts “the cult of unlimited human power” and the “myth of unlimited material progress”. The third cause is “the rise of a relativism which sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s own immediate interests”.

He clearly states that this three-headed monster leads to environmental degradation and social decay.

To a culture that believes that reality is constructed by humans with hardly any reference to nature, Francis, like his predecessors, preaches that we cannot disregard the message contained in the structures of nature. To a society that foments the Promethean vision based on the cult of unlimited human power, Francis gives a dire warning. When humans declare independence from reality and place themselves instead of God, big trouble follows.

The Pope strongly supports those who say that human intervention is responsible for climate change

As noted above a key phrase of the encyclical is that “everything is connected”. We cannot pick and choose if we really want to build an ethic of responsibility.

For Francis the present ecological crisis is one small sign of the ethical, cultural and spiritual crisis of modernity which is violently anti-human. The culture of relativism drives one person to take advantage of another and to treat others as mere objects while glorifying the market.

It is difficult to hear the cry of nature if we don’t respect “the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disability”. He yet again criticises the gender theory for pretending that we “enjoy absolute power over our own bodies” and exults the family “as the heart of the culture of life”. He is against the idea that poverty is resolved by the reduction in the birth rate or the introduction of so-called policies of reproductive health. For Francis then “concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion”.

A particularly strong statement against relativism is paragraph 123: “In the absence of objective truths or sound principles other than the satisfaction of our own desires and immediate needs, what limits can be placed on human trafficking, organised crime, the drug trade, commerce in blood diamonds and the fur of endangered species?

Is it not the same relativistic logic which justifies buying the organs of the poor for resale or use in experimentation, or eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted?”

Those who blabber Pope Francis’s name as if it were an empty slogan would do well to read what he writes and not what the media write about what he writes. It is nonsensical to applaud Francis when he points towards the conditions that disfigure the face of Mother Earth but shoo away when he points towards the human-generated socio-cultural underpinning which poisons her.

Don’t treat Pope Francis as if he was a restaurant buffet.

• Last Sunday (June 21) It-Torċa heralded the beginning of summer by gracing its front page with a beautiful (sic) full colour photo of yours truly while on Tuesday L-orizzont followed suit and sang my praises in its leader. L-orizzont had done the same on July 19, 2013. I am flattered though I am not alone as L-orizzont is almost perversely extremely attracted to men of the cloth.

I remember L-orizzont lampooning Archbishop Joseph Mercieca in the vilest of cartoons. In one such cartoon the crucified Christ offers his hand to Mercieca who asks how much will the Lord pay him to take it.

On the eve of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Malta, L-orizzont had a one-word screaming headline: ‘W€LCOME’. The euro symbol substituted the letter ‘E’. They had the temerity to suggest that the Pope was visiting Malta for financial gain!

They had even falsely accused Gozo Bishop Mario Grech of sacrilegious actions with their maliciously untrue report that he was trying to expedite the proposed beatification process of Dun Mikiel Attard to prop up the electoral fortunes of the then minister Giovanna Debono!

Now Archbishop Charles Scicluna is in their line of fire. The editor is firing strong warning shots. Perhaps he is waiting for Scicluna to repent; though I have not heard that he has ordered any sackcloth or ashes.

It seems that I am in fine company.

Laudato Sì!

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt

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