We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theology of Laudato Si

"We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us" (Laudato Si §67) by "a Father Who Creates and Who Alone Owns the World" (§75)

Is Catholic Social Teaching a specifically theological enterprise? And if so, can one show it in the case of the most recent magisterial instantiation of Catholic Social Teaching, Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si, On the Care for Our Common Home? I think that a positive answer must be given to both questions. Part of the reasons I think so are of an autobiographical nature. About forty-five years ago I founded an environmental youth group, the first ever in my hometown in northern Bavaria. This youth group was part of a youth network that was a branch of a national environmental organization. I am talking here about the academic year 1974–1975, just about four years after Greenpeace had been founded in Vancouver, Canada, and five years before the Green Party was to be founded in then West Germany. The wake-up call and catalyst for my initiative had been a memorable encounter with the first Club of Rome Report from 1972, The Limits to Growth. This report shocked me and my friends into an acute awareness of an approaching ecological crisis. Our environmental youth group was a first local activist response. In our highschool chemistry lab, we tested the—at that time rather alarming—water quality of the main river in our area and publicized our findings in the local newspaper; we organized polls, public events, and demonstrations in order to raise the awareness of the local population about environmental challenges and threats; we also organized the first municipal glass-recycling program; and we overall acted as "mud rakers," exposing in the local newspaper pollution caused by companies, municipalities, and private organizations. Needless to say, we did not only have friends.

Most members of our youth group eventually joined the Green Party when it was founded in 1980. I, however, decided to study philosophy and theology at the university. And this decision is part of the providential chain of events that brings me to this conference today and to the topic I am speaking about. Those among you my age or older might remember that in the mid-1970s in Europe and in the United States neither the Catholic Church nor the Protestants were really concerned about the unfolding global environmental crisis. One noteworthy exception was Blessed Pope Paul VI, who in his 1971 apostolic letter Octogesima Adveniens—written on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the foundational text of modern Catholic Social Teaching—referred to the ecological crisis as "a tragic consequence" of unchecked human activity: "Due to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation" (§21). Together with other important teachings of Pope Paul VI, this prophetic warning remained almost completely unheeded. The post-conciliar progressives were then engaged in the "theology of revolution," a largely Marxist-inspired radical precursor to the subsequent more moderate and more theologically grounded "theology of liberation." Most post-conciliar progressives dismissed our ecological concerns as a bourgeois and possibly even reactionary strategy of distraction that pulled away attention and energy from the one cause that mattered—the class struggle and the eventual overthrow of global capitalism. That forty years later, the magisterium of the Catholic Church would issue a teaching document of the magnitude, scope, and depth of Laudato Si was then utterly unimaginable and beyond the range of our wildest hopes.

Why did I decide to turn to philosophy and theology while most of my friends from the youth group joined the Green Party? They, quite obviously, desired to help transform our local initiatives into national and even global policies of environmental protection and ecological sustainability. While I continued to share these concerns and, as a matter of fact, voted for the Green Party regularly at all elections on the local and on the state level in then West Germany, my primary...