The time has come to pay renewed attention to reality and the limits it imposes this in turn is the condition for a more sound and fruitful development of individuals and society. Modernity has been marked by an excessive anthropocentrism which today, under another guise, continues to stand in the way of shared understanding and of any effort to strengthen social bonds. The Pope's principal of stewardship is fantastic, and his explicit rejection of a flawed religious conception of humanity's relationship with nature is excellent, but his failing to honestly acknowledge the stewardship implications of population growth is a huge mistake:ġ16. The population analysis in the encyclical is woeful (paragraphs 50 and 95), which undercuts significantly the value of the document as a basis for holistic human stewardship. Francis would have hit a home run if he had been honest about population. I agree completely with the analysis of Bob Thurman in The Pope Hits a Triple.
I agree with what the Pope said on these points, but I wish he had made a couple of other critical stewardship points relating to methane and fertilizers. Similarly, although most people probably do not notice it, the Pope only referred to fertilizers once, and then only to point out their pollution contribution (paragraph 20).
It is mentioned in two places in Pope Francis's generally excellent encyclical, both from the vantage point that methane use and release plays a role in global warming (paragraphs 23 and 24). Methane is the main component of natural gas. While these may seem mundane, they are critical to human survival and hence critical to intelligent stewardship of the Earth's nonrenewable resources. Please allow me to give a specific example with which I have some familiarity.Īs a democratic socialist with a background in agricultural science, I will in the remainder of this piece focus on some specific concerns of a technical nature. Obviously there is the population issue to which Francis has blinders. But how holistic is Francis's holism? How holistic is the left's holism? While continuing to criticize Francis on birth control and choice, there is a need for the left to come to a better understanding of the strengths and, yes, even some weaknesses of Francis's much more scientifically-based document. We know the right is not interested in holism. It is wonderful to see the Pope effectively endorsing this approach, as he also began to do in Evangelii Gaudium. relations that holism is a critical approach that the left has to offer the world. Environmental problems tend to be looked at in developed countries as single issue right versus left "green" scientific and political phenomena only, without looking at the underlying economic, social, and cultural factors, including the dependency of capitalism on cheap fuel to generate profits and so-called "growth." I have pointed out, somewhat humorously, in the context of Cuban agriculture and Cuban-U.S. The general point I will make is that Francis is, with the huge exception of population, being "holistic" in his approach to environmental problems. Rather, I merely want to make one general point and to give a specific example of how his work and the left's, cautiously together, hopeful, and prudent, is just beginning. How should the left respond? That is a complicated praxis issue that I will not attempt to address in detail in this piece.
Now Pope Francis has written a message of love and challenge to the entire world, Laudato si'. So, I did my best (a) to summarize some aspects of pertinent Jesuit history and (b) to discuss how Francis was in many ways repeating deeply held views that the Jesuits have been fleshing out since Vatican II, the advent of liberation theology, and the vicious right wing response to liberation theology. However, in addition to maintaining solidarity with humanity and particularly women on the need for birth control and choice, the left needed to understand Francis's social doctrine within the context of Jesuit history and scholarship to avoid a purposeful minimization of its implications by the right. I felt that this apostolic exhortation to the faithful presented a unique opportunity to the left to begin working with Francis, despite his failure to deal with birth control and choice. When it first came out, I did a lengthy " socialized reflection" on the praxis implications of Pope Francis's Evangelii Gaudium.
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