Air Date: Week of April 25, 2025

Pope Francis wrote his first papal document on the environment, Laudato Si’, in 2015. (Photo: Catholic Church England and Wales, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In 2023 Pope Francis published an even bolder update to Laudato Si’, his climate change encyclical. Christiana Zenner of Fordham University joined Host Paloma Beltran to discuss how “Laudate Deum” takes on climate denial and urges the world to act swiftly to avert climate disaster.

Transcript

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran.

We’re continuing our coverage of the impact the late Pope Francis had on the environment and climate movements. Before the break we heard about his seminal 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home. A few months after Laudato Si’ was published, the world’s nations adopted the Paris Agreement. A watershed moment for global action on climate though the Trump administration is once again withdrawing the United States from Paris. In 2023 Pope Francis came out with an even more daring sequel, Laudate Deum or “praise God for all his creatures”. And Fordham University professor Christiana Zenner joined us again to shed light on the Pope’s even more urgent call for climate action.

ZENNER: This document is a total zinger compared to Laudato Si'. So whereas Laudato Si' in 2015, was extensive, it was quite long, it was measured and pastoral and expressive and philosophical. This document, Laudate Deum, is much shorter. And it is super focused on the realities of climate crises, the realism of climate change, anthropogenic climate change in particular, as a moral, ecological social problem, and on the responsibility of all people to take up action in order to address these problems. So there's a lot of really specific citation of science, there is a lot of very specific invocation about the kinds of things that need to happen. And then there is a little bit of philosophical and theological framing. But it's a really punchy document. And in some points, it's actually even a little bit snarky. He's saying to very high consuming nations, and specifically the US, he calls out the US explicitly in the penultimate paragraph of the exhortation. He says the rates of consumption are so far above China, and even more profoundly above peoples and nations that are far less developed. And so he's really taking language that is similar to the Kyoto Protocol and other kinds of agreements that see consumption by particular nations as historically problematic and in an ongoing way. It's also I think, taking pretty specific aim at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and climate denialists. As you may know, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has been pretty focused on pelvic issues, on abortion and contraception, etc, as its primary moral focus. And I think that it's no accident that the Pope uses a US Bishop's document from 2019 on climate change as the first citation, and then ends the document with this throwdown about US consumption. I think that's a pretty substantial frame.

BELTRAN: It seems like Pope Francis is not beating around the bush when it comes to climate change.

ZENNER: Oh, he is not. This is a throwdown document. It's really a zinger. So he's also then, especially in the first part of the apostolic exhortation, talking about climate denialism. And just taking it down, point by point. He just says, no, this doesn't hold, this is not tenable. This is not a Catholic point of view, it's not even a reasonable point of view. And let me show you why. And so in a very effective way, he just critiques those arguments. So for example, he says that in recent years, some have chosen to deride these facts, he's speaking of climate change. Then he says, they'll bring up the allegedly solid scientific data, like the fact that the planet has always had and will have periods of cooling and warming. But then he goes on to say, they forget to mention another relevant datum, that what we are presently experiencing is an unusual acceleration of warming at such a speed that it will take only one generation in order to verify it. And he does this a number of times, this language that is basically some claim, or some deride these facts, and they'll present this kind of claim, but they forget to include this other additional claim. And so in a way that is rhetorically powerful and philosophically grounded, he's calling those folks to task and saying your philosophy is bad and your science is too. Get with it.

BELTRAN: So what does this document say about the connection between the Catholic Church and the scientific world?

ZENNER: One of the things that's really interesting, and in many respects great about the Catholic Church is that in the late 20th century especially, it has had a pretty robust engagement with contemporary sciences of the time. And this document continues that trend. So if you look at the citations, like scholars love to do, if you follow the footnotes, there are tons of citations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, these kinds of consensus documents that indicate the patterns, extent, and implications of anthropogenic climate changes. And so not only are those in the footnotes supporting a range of claims, there's also explicit numbers throughout the document. So I would say there's a huge relationship between the Catholic Church and science in this document. Because a lot of people think, oh, Catholic Church. Science. Well, Galileo, that didn't go well. But when we delve into it, you know, absolutely, yes, lots of problems going on in that era for sure. But there are also always really interesting moments that religious institutions, in this case, the Catholic Church, can assess developments in science and either hunker down and refuse to engage the questions raised, or say, wow, this looks like a big issue. What does this mean for theology, for morality, and for the project of being human? And that's what the Pope has chosen to do.

BELTRAN: Christiana, what surprised you the most about Laudate Deum?

ZENNER: What surprised me the most? Well, I think there are a few things. One is how pithy and direct it is. The Pope knows what he's doing in this. And the structure of the apostolic exhortation, as well as the tone is remarkably direct, very readable, and, in many ways, at least from an interdisciplinary ethics perspective, irrefutable on the dynamics of climate change, and the science behind it, economic growth presumptions and the dynamics of consumerism, and what Pope Francis calls in a slightly more philosophical and theological way, the technocratic paradigm, which is a fetishization of economic efficiency and technological innovation. The presumption that those alone will solve ecological or social problems. So I was really, frankly stunned and really happy to see someone who is in a position of authority, yes, in a hierarchical patriarchal context that has massive problems. But as we saw in the reception of the 2015 Laudato Si' document, he's in a position to get people's attention. Another set of things that surprised me and didn't. There's one citation in there, citation 41, of feminist philosopher of science, Donna Haraway. She's an American, a long standing professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, someone who's been very critical of normative gender hierarchies as they play out in the practice and conceptualization of science, and a real advocate for multi-species relations. So she shows up in footnote 41, which is shocking, because she's on record as being anti-Catholic, anti-institutionally-Catholic, and anti-theistic in that sense. So, how on earth did this citation get into the apostolic exhortation? And what does it mean? I am fascinated and a number of us are trying to dig into this.

BELTRAN: So Pope Francis cited Donna Haraway, what did he say there?

ZENNER: So she is cited in a section on anthropocentrism. The idea that humans are at the center functionally, as well as morally, of the earth and of theological significance. And so Pope Francis says, the technocratic paradigm, which he had earlier critiqued, can deceive us by making us forget that the entire world is a contact zone. And he cites this book by Donna Haraway, called When Species Meet. And then the section goes on to talk about well, we can't have like a full anthropocentrism where humans are the only or exclusive focus, we need a situated anthropocentrism that recognizes the interrelations and the limits to human centrality and power. It is completely fascinating that the Pope chooses to cite her or the Pope's ghost writers, don't know which one. But it's kind of a two part thing. There's that whole reaction of oh my gosh, what on earth? And then the second part is, isn't it interesting, that of all the women to cite, all of the experts who happen to be women, the one he cites is Donna Haraway. And not the many, many, many women within the Catholic Church. Celia Deane-Drummond, Brazilian ecofeminist liberation theologian Ivone Gebara, there are so many brilliant scholars who are women who have been working with eco-theologies and orders of nuns who have been implementing ideas like this that far preceded even Laudato Si' in 2015. So the citation of Haraway is doubly bizarre. Because why not cite women who are also engaging the work of the church? And one skeptical answer is, well, there's a long history of excluding them. And maybe it would mean that their critiques would have to be taken seriously. I don't know. But it's one viable hypothesis.

BELTRAN: That was an excerpt from our 2023 conversation with Christiana Zenner, associate professor of theology, science and ethics at Fordham University. It only seems fitting to close our remembrance of Pope Francis with a few more words from the man himself. The day after his 2015 visit to the White House, Pope Francis addressed a joint session of Congress, the first Pope to do so. It was a time of divided government, when Republicans controlled the House and Senate during the waning months of Democrat Barack Obama’s Presidency. The Pope called for unity and leadership from the US to address the climate crisis.

POPE FRANCIS: "In Laudato Si’, I call for a courageous and responsible effort to “redirect our steps” (ibid., 61), and to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity. I am convinced that we can make a difference – I’m sure.”

BELTRAN: The late Pope Francis, speaking to congress in 2015. Pope Francis may be gone from this world but his writings on climate and environment endure. You can find links to Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum on the Living on Earth website, loe dot org.

 

Links

Pope Francis’ “Laudate Deum” apostolic exhortation

Listen to our interview with Christiana Zenner on Laudato Si’ in 2015

About Christiana Zenner