Breda O’Brien: Pope’s views on environment echo tradition of social teaching

Last week the Green Party hosted an event discussing socially responsible and community-based business models but also emphasised that there would be some free beer.

It was craft beer, naturally, from environmentally responsible brewers, but it was probably also a wry acknowledgement that most people need an incentive in order to think about the planet’s future.

Whatever about the free beer, Pope Francis would probably approve of the idea of socially responsible enterprises. In his encyclical Laudato Si' he says business is a "noble vocation" directed "to producing wealth and improving our world".

For some of his critics, especially some Americans on the right wing in relation to economics, Laudato Si' is a bit of an abomination, because it takes some vicious swipes at the excesses of capitalism. Funny how à la carte some Catholics become when the pope says something that displeases them.

But the pope is simply following in a long tradition of some 120 years of Catholic social teaching that goes back to Rerum Novarum in 1892. The church insists the economy must be at the service of people, not the other way around.

Rerum Novarum, written by Leo XIII, concerns itself with the "misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class". It affirmed the rights of labour, including the right to unionise.

Integral development

Pope

John Paul

II, widely credited with playing an influential role in the fall of the Iron Curtain, was no fan of rampant capitalism, either. In

Sollicitudo Rei Socialis

, his 1987 encyclical on the social doctrine of the church, he said the church “adopts a critical attitude towards both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism”. For him, the key question is whether these ideologies are capable of changing so as to “promote a true and integral development of individuals and peoples in modern society?”

John Paul also used the phrase “human ecology”, which Pope Francis builds on, asking how we can we develop an “integral ecology”.

Just as John Paul II was shaped and formed by his experience of being a Polish man born in 1920 who lived under communism, Francis is shaped by being an Argentinian.

A phrase from the encyclical caused some hilarity, and immediately became a hashtag, that is, that the Earth resembles “an immense pile of filth”. But this encyclical can be understood only in the context of the passion for the poor Jorge Bergoglio developed in Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires has notorious "villas miserias", or shanty-town housing, where about 10 per cent of the population live, with many of the residents from Peru, Bolivia and Uruguay.

Writer Ben Davis described one such slum as possibly having “the worst feng shui in the world: it is built in a flood zone over a former lake, a toxic dump and a cemetery”. The phrase “immense pile of filth” begins to look more understandable in the light of being shaped by trying to serve people in such places. This is a passionate plea to the world “to hear both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor”.

Cry of nature

His critics are missing something if they think this is just some left-wing rant. There is a clear world view that sees “human ecology” at the heart of everything. The encyclical says: “When we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities – to offer just a few examples – it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected.”

Everything is connected: this is precisely the message our modern world misses.

Francis also insists on the importance of recognising difference: “Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognise myself in an encounter with someone who is different.”

He has also been criticised for involving in Vatican conferences people such as Naomi Klein, a self-described secular Jewish feminist. Klein's strength, however, lies in the ability to generate a moral imperative to change. Like Francis, she believes that ultimately the real changes begin within.

Threats to fertility

In her most recent book,

This Changes Everything

, she describes how she began to draw links between her own struggles with fertility, including miscarriages and miserable experiences with IVF, and the threats to fertility in the natural world posed by acidification of oceans and chemical pollution.

She began to see that the human body has natural limits, and so does the Earth.

Francis is a bridge-builder, willing to form alliances with people of goodwill without presuming this obliterates differences.

He is 78, but his passion and energy is inspiring. Perhaps not just his words, but his example, will inspire many other people to see beyond partisan differences to the immense crisis that must be tackled. Even without free beer.