Lessons for the World

By: Drew Christiansen

June 18, 2015

Die Zeit, June 18, 2015

Since 1963 popes have addressed their social teaching not just to the Catholic faithful but also to “men and women of good will.” Expectation for Pope Francis’s new encyclical “Laudato Si” seems as high among the world’s public, if not higher, than among Catholics themselves.

Reporting from the US Catholic bishops’ semi-annual meeting in Saint Louis last week, the New York Times reporter Laurie Goodstein wrote that so far the receptivity of the majority of American bishops to the anticipated letter is decidedly cool. “But the leaders of the Catholic Church in the United States may be harder to win over. At the spring meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops here last week, bishops from around the country said they were withholding their enthusiasm until they saw the document.”

But, if history is any guide, the wide public interest may be of greater significance than that of the American bishops. Pacem in terris (“Peace on Earth”), Saint Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical roused enormous interest around the world. For twenty years, former Saturday Evening Review editor Norman Cousins, an intermediary between the pope, US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, ran conferences on the Santa Barbara-based Center for Democratic Institutions, where he was president.

Pacem in terris also had a transformative effect on the church itself, making it a major advocate for human rights and democracy in the last decades of the twentieth century. The late conservative political theorist Samuel Huntington identified the Catholic Church, inspired by the teaching of Pope John, as a major factor in “the third wave of democratization” beginning in the 1960s. 

It is already apparent that Pope Francis is signaling he has drawn on a wider circle of advisers than previous popes in drafting the new environmental encyclical, and he hopes to speak to a wider audience.

The press conference introducing the encyclical will include Greek Orthodox theologian John Ziziolas, the metropolitan or archbishop of Pergamon as one of its principle presenters and a representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, often called “the green patriarch.”

The metropolitan’s participation suggests that Laudato Si will draw on Orthodox theology and spirituality in laying out its own case for guarding “our common home.” It immediately makes the letter less narrowly a Catholic statement and more an ecumenical one, representing both western and eastern streams of Christianity. 

Also speaking at the roll-out will be Professor John Schellnhuber, a climate scientist and founder of the Potsdam Center for Climate Research and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Global Climate Change. 

Pope Francis, whose university training and early career were in chemistry, clearly wants to show that while letter is focused on ecological ethics, it takes science seriously. In his 2013 apostolic exhortation “The Joy of the Gospel” he urged “the encounter of faith, reason and the sciences.” 

Catholic social teaching has often had visible impact on public affairs. A decade after the publication of Pacem in Terris, with encouragement of the Second Vatican Council, beginning with the Chile’s Vicariat for Solidarity, dioceses around the world opened human rights and justice and peace offices that defended popular rights against oppressive governments.

Numerous Nobel Peace Prize laureates drew inspiration from Catholic teaching and the church’s social action networks. They include: Lech Walesa in Poland, Kim Dae Jung in South Korea, Mairead Corrigan Maguire in Northern Ireland and Felipe Ximenes Belo in Timor L’Ester. 

Other notable Catholic rights advocates are Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, Jose Zalaquett (Amnesty International) in Chile, Franjo Komarica in Bosnia, Michel Sabbah in Israel and Palestine, Samuel Ruiz in Mexico and Juan Gerardi in Guatemala.

The US bishops’ 1983 peace pastoral “The Challenge of Peace,” with its various published drafts educated the American public on the just-war principles. When in 1990 the US Senate debated entry into the First Gulf War, the Senators and the commentors, including former President Jimmy Carter, appealed to just-war principles that had been popularized in the peace pastoral.

When the Republican Party won the House of Representatives in 1994, its Contract for America included several provisions for subverting environmental legislation. The chief of these was “Takings” legislation, which would have ruled any loss of value or diminishment of anticipated profit “a taking” of private property requiring financial compensation by the government.

A “a non-paper” circulated to the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality applied Catholic Social Teaching’s notion of “the social mortgage” on private property—the idea that private property has social obligations—to environmental regulation, thus upholding the existing law. 

Vice President Al Gore shared the paper with then Senator Majority Leader Bob Dole. Senator Dole, a Republican, was convinced. He withdrew takings from the Senate agenda and brought the onslaught on environmental legislation to a dead stop.

The following Spring when Vice President Gore met with the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an association of the Catholic bishops’ conference and the National Council of Churches with Jewish and Evangelical environmental networks, he began by thanking “the Catholics for stopping ‘takings’.” 

Even in uncongenial times, Catholic social teaching can make a decisive difference on controversial issues. With worldwide interest and Pope Francis’s exceptional moral authority, built not only on his office but on his personal integrity and charisma, Laudato Si has potential to shape global environmental policy. It is particularly poised to give impetus to agreement on a Global Covenant on Climate Change in Paris in December in ways that may surprise us all. 

This article originally appeared in Die Zeit.

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