Father George Rutler reminds readers that popes have been wrong. In the Galileo case, Pope Urban VIII was wrong about Copernican theory. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis is wrong about climate science, some will contend; differing interpretations of data lead to opposing schools of thought, and Francis has endorsed one that is mainstream now but may not be a century from now.
My colleagues on the whole take issue especially with the populist economic sentiments that Francis tried to integrate into the encyclical.
Taken together, the 40,000 words amount to something like his vision of how the whole secular world should be ordered and governed. He ranges widely. I would like to think (but am not persuaded) that socially conservative ideas are the heart of the encyclical and that the pope has shrewdly wrapped them in language designed to conform to present-day political fashion, much as, for the benefit of the progressive mind, the architects of the seamless-garment movement in the 1980s sweetened the pro-life message by mixing it with peacenik rhetoric and opposition to the death penalty.
Paragraph 155, for example, on sexual complementarity, is an affirmation of traditional Catholic teaching where it is increasingly at odds with the mores of Western societies. Sexual complementarity is related to climate change and economic inequality because “everything is interrelated.” Francis telegraphs how the thousand parts of “our common home” cohere, as he sees it, but most people don’t see it. If they read the encyclical honestly (rather than crudely mining it for lines that support their pet causes), they will conclude that the pope aspired to more than he achieved.
Even if the encyclical were entirely cogent, the question would remain whether its particular scope of topics was appropriate for a papal document. The this-worldly, literally mundane business that is its subject matter involves questions that are, from a believer’s point of view, below the pope’s pay grade. It’s as if Francis is taking positions on the insulation techniques and HVAC system that should be incorporated into plans for the renovation of a parish church. “But the people will be distracted at Holy Mass if the temperature is too hot or too cold,” I can imagine him arguing. “Attention to every humble detail . . . ”
At its root, yes, “wealth” means “well-being,” and the Church, in its mission to follow Christ by helping the poor, inevitably makes forays into economic theory. Feed the hungry and clothe the naked first. Otherwise their minds will be elsewhere when you go to them to preach or administer the sacraments. It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The spiritual needs at the tip of the pyramid rest on the baser needs at the base. Grace builds on nature. All that is clear.
My fellow conservatives get upset when the Church tries to micromanage the business of satisfying the baser needs but is misinformed or badly advised. My complaint is that the institutional Church doesn’t try harder to avoid wading into the weeds of public policy in the first place. It spends too much energy acting like an NGO. And, no, that problem does not originate with Pope Francis. You could trace it back to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) or even, I suppose, the emperor Constantine in the fourth century.
Some years ago I attended a lecture by a conservative Catholic intellectual who spoke with passion and in great detail about the bureaucratic apparatus of the Holy See but without giving even a clue as to what was holy about it. The presentation was academic, respectable, boring, and cold. I felt what a friend, a liberal nun with whom I disagreed about much, was trying to get at when she said once that if she had her way she would evacuate Vatican City and then demolish it because it’s “not what Christ intended.” The art and architecture are still capable of inclining the mind and heart to God and to the mysteries of the Christian faith, so I would preserve them.