The Pope's Divisions

THE POPE'S “climate change encyclical,” Laudato Si’ (“Praise Be to You”), is actually far more than that: It is the most remarkable religious document in a generation, offering a powerful and comprehensive worldview that is consonant with the Bible and hence profoundly countercultural. You owe it to yourself to take a few hours and read it slowly and carefully; you’ll be enlightened, but mostly, if you’re like me, you’ll be reassured. Reassured that someone powerful in this world actually sees our time for what it is, and understands the crises facing our planet for what they are.

Near the beginning, for instance, the pope discusses the “rapidification” of life, the sense that “the speed with which human activity has developed contrasts with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution. Moreover, the goals of this rapid and constant change are not necessarily geared to the common good or to integral and sustainable human development. Change is something desirable, yet it becomes a source of anxiety when it causes harm to the world and to the quality of life of much of humanity.”

That’s as useful a description of the last 100 years as we’re likely to get, that sense of life out of balance. It affects the poor, yes, and the pope is always most mindful of the poor—but it also affects everyone. The ever-more-technologized world we inhabit no longer makes us happier. It makes us stressed.

The pope names a litany of other problems: We have become too individualized and so we overlook the common good. Beauty is sacrificed to cheapness. Public spaces are privatized. If all of this sounds familiar, there’s definitely an E.F. Schumacher vibe to the encyclical, more than a touch of Ivan Illich. Quite a bit of Wendell Berry too. It doesn’t come from the Right or the Left; it comes from lived experience.

But those other writers could be—have been—more or less dismissed. The powers that be would like to dismiss Francis too (no less a spokesman for the status quo than Jeb Bush told the pope, in so many words, to butt out of politics). They can’t simply dismiss Pope Francis, however, because something’s changed: The world has come unglued. Francis describes in great detail the climate crisis and its attendant horrors: the droughts, the warming ocean, the melting glaciers. The physical world has been conducting a thorough referendum on our current civilization, and now the results can be read in rising sea levels and falling groundwater tables.

Pope Francis’ letter was greeted with great enthusiasm by many, me included. But the fact that he has written it does not by itself change the outcome of the battle. He may have united religion with science in this great moment, but the world’s third force—money—so far remains an implacable force. Indeed, the week he published his letter, the U.S. Congress, working in bipartisan fashion, approved the new “fast-track” trade agreement—the perfect distillation of the unquestioning “rapidification” that the pope decries.

So it is up to the rest of us to make this wrenching and radical document real. When Stalin was told that a previous pope had called for the end of repression of Christians, the dictator replied contemptuously: “The pope! How many divisions has he got?”

Doubtless the CEOs of Shell and Exxon are thinking the same thing. It’s time for all of us to be those divisions, and to march with real unity for the kind of world that Pope Francis imagines.