Today,  October 4th, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, 8 years after his encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis released his exhortation “Laudato Deum” on the climate crisis. 

In our first reading tomorrow the priest Ezra assembled the people to renew their loyalty to God’s covenant and learn the law of God. (Nehemiah 8:1-12) He called all the people to the critical task of rebuilding God’s Temple. 

It isn’t just about climate change Pope Francis speaks; it’s climate crisis. “The world in which we live is collapsing and may be near the breaking point.” You can’t miss the urgency for action in his letter. “No one can ignore the fact that in recent years we have witnessed extreme weather phenomena, frequent periods of unusual heat, drought and other cries of protest on the part of the earth that are only a few palpable expressions of a silent disease that affects everyone.”

Some ridicule the claims of danger; Francis takes them seriously and lays out the facts the scientific world provides. He also points out the responsibility of the richer countries for this situation and deals with the arguments for inaction that are raised, even by members of the Church.

“ I feel obliged to make these clarifications, which may appear obvious, because of certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church. Yet we can no longer doubt that the reason for the unusual rapidity of these dangerous changes is a fact that cannot be concealed: the enormous novelties that have to do with unchecked human intervention on nature in the past two centuries.”

There’s a growing belief, the pope says, that thinks “as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such”. [14] As a logical consequence, it then becomes easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology”.

Pope Francis outlines the efforts the nations of the world have made so far to deal with the crisis and finds them lacking. He calls for a new level of power to arise, from the grassroots, to energize the situation of political inertia. At the same time, he calls for the nations of the world to fulfill their responsibilities at the upcoming meeting on the climate,  COP28 in Dubai.

Finally, like Ezra, Francis speaks to people of faith to embark on “ a pilgrim of reconciliation with the world that is our home,”  to build it to be a beautiful home.

One interesting point for us in the United States. The pope begins his exhortation quoting from the US Bishops: “This is a global social issue and one intimately related to the dignity of human life. The Bishops of the United States have expressed very well this social meaning of our concern about climate change, which goes beyond a merely ecological approach, because ‘our care for one another and our care for the earth are intimately bound together. Climate change is one of the principal challenges facing society and the global community. The effects of climate change are borne by the most vulnerable people, whether at home or around the world’”.

He ends his exhortation with this observation: “If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, [44] we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact.”