Listening to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor : the mission of the church in a time of ecological crisis

Abstract

From his pre-conclave speech prior to his election as pope, to his calls for the Church to a greater sense of synodality, Pope Francis has been on a personal mission to continue to reorient the Catholic Church from self-referential and inward looking to a Church which reads the signs of the times, recognises its ever-expanding mission to the world, and prioritises the voice of the poor. Almost immediately after his inauguration as pope, he foreshadowed a desire to write an encyclical on the environmental crisis, a focus that took the Church beyond its usual boundaries, in reading the signs of this time, and to urge the world to listen to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. While this desire took some time to come to fruition, the text of Laudato si’ (LS) has been as ground breaking as the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum novarum (RN), which initiated the modern era of Catholic Social Teaching. Just as Leo XIII wrote on the “new things” of industrialisation and its impact on the workforce and the rights of the workers, so Pope Francis wrote on the “new” issue of our ongoing environmental crises, which threaten the fragile stability of our planetary ecosystem. [extract]