Mikaela Martinez Dettinger - Laudato Si

 Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si is a call to both the Catholic community and the world as a whole to care for Creation. In his encyclical, Pope Francis advocates for the science that proves global warming, calls upon past the writings of his predecessors on the topic, and, most interestingly to me, frames the climate crisis as a call to care for the underprivileged and poor of our earth. 

Laudato Si is an interesting example of the relationship between religion and ecology because Pope Francis manages to balance a call to action regarding the climate crisis and Catholic and Christian values while still maintaining an attitude of universality. His Holiness manages to accomplish this mostly by framing the climate crisis as a social welfare problem. He states:

    Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited. For example, changes in climate, to which animals and plants cannot adapt, lead them to migrate; this in turn affects the livelihood of the poor, who are then forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children. (25)

He also cites science which links climate change to increasing number of premature deaths among the poor and underprivileged. He uses this connection between social justice and climate change to appeal to whole societies. He strengthens this approach by appealing to both the financial and humanitarian aspect of the correlation between the poor and the climate crisis.  He then continues to use this connection to appeal more specifically to the Catholic population. He references his predecessors and often cites the Bible in order to do this. Most notable, he cites Matthew 25: 40 which reads "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." This calls upon the Catholic community to remember the universal quality of the church as well as the service orientation of it. It is truly a work of beauty how Pope Francis is able to balance all of these different appeals within Laudato Si.