Despite that Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ was widely interpreted as a policy document, it may well be the most theologically radical text (in the literal sense of “going to the roots”) in the whole social encyclical tradition. And its message is largely addressed, not to government officials and financiers, but to the ordinary person.
Overall, the encyclical aims at what Francis, borrowing a term from St. John Paul II, calls “ecological conversion.” What does he mean by this bizarre phrase?
In Lumen fidei, Francis explained why the Church has social doctrine to begin with, by saying that faith grasps society’s “ultimate foundation and definitive destiny in God, in his love, and thus sheds light on the art of building.” In LS, he takes the same approach to the whole of creation. “Creation is of the order of love. God’s love,” he says, “is the fundamental moving force in all created things.” And the interrelation and interdependence of all created things is a Trinitarian mystery: “the universe as a whole, in all its manifold relationships, shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God”; everything “testifies that God is three.”
On this basis, Francis expands the word “ecological”—to refer to the, so to speak, ecosystem of our being. And he helpfully boils our “manifold”…
