Laudate Deum is the name of Pope Francis’ 2023 document on the climate crisis. I will introduce the document in this article, and then we can explore some of its main themes over the next few weeks.
Smoke from Canadian wildfires, coastal Michigan, summer 2023
The document is not long, at 18 pages it can be read in half an hour. You can find it here in English on the Vatican web site (it’s available in 13 languages there.) It is an apostolic exhortation. Papal writings have a hierarchy to cover various purposes and levels of importance. An apostolic exhortation is one of the most important papal documents, directed at the entire Church or world. In this case, Laudate Deum is addressed “to all people of good will”, which means most of the world’s people. Even if a person doesn’t want what is good, I imagine the Pope would still like them to read it.
Laudate Deum was promulgated in October 2023, shortly before the COP 28 global climate conference. At the time, some reporters dubbed it “Laudato Si 2.0”, but this is not entirely accurate. Laudato Si’ is an encyclical – an even higher and broader type of papal document than Laudate Deum. Laudate Deum is specifically subtitled “on the climate crisis”, which is narrower in scope than its predecessor. Laudato Si’ addresses the climate, but in the larger context of environmental degradation including pollution, loss of biodiversity, poverty, and other issues.
It's more accurate to think of Laudate Deum as the Pope’s report card on our progress with the climate crisis since Laudato Si’ was released in 2015. The Pope did not give us a letter grade, but it would probably be a D minus trending to an F.
The tone of Laudate Deum is challenging, and it explicitly calls out some of the failures of the prior eight years since Laudato Si’ came out. Its primary concern is national and international responses to the climate crisis, as well as the societal forces of climate denial and deflection. While delivering some negative facts and behaviors, its intent is to exhort us to work harder for positive solutions. The document calls the world to higher moral ground and more unity of action.
One of its themes is that there is no longer any justification for denying that there is a climate crisis. Paragraph 5 begins “Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident.” The document then goes into significant detail on the evidence that we are in a climate crisis, based on findings in the physical and social sciences. For the Church, the time for debate is over, and it is now time to take bold and aggressive action.
The Church clearly supports international efforts to address the climate crisis, primarily embodied in the United Nations’ COP conferences. But the Pope sees many failures to produce tangible results for the environment from these conferences. The timing of this document was clearly an attempt to encourage world leaders to take decisive action at the COP 28 conference in Dubai.
Laudate Deum reinforces the theme in Laudato Si’ that wealthy nations need to lead in responding to the climate crisis. Pope Francis takes the unusual step of calling out the United States explicitly, saying in the next-to-last paragraph:
If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected
with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact. (72)
I’ll come back to this theme in a later article, but it’s worth noting here that Laudate Deum has been poorly received in the United States. This particular quotation was widely shared both in secular and Catholic media in the USA at its publication. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a brief and bland statement on Laudate Deum last October and has not addressed it in any significant way since then. The Pope is holding the United States accountable for its carbon pollution, and challenging common behaviors in our culture as “irresponsible”.
Every papal document enters a political context when it is published, and Laudate Deum ran headlong into conservative political forces in the United States. These forces are conservative in the sense that they are resisting societal change in general, while the Pope is calling for dramatic change in our resource consumption and lifestyles. This conservative mindset is active in the Church as well as in secular society, which has contributed to the weak response to the Pope’s environmental writings among many Catholics. Some have gone so far as to label our Holy Father a leftist, socialist, communist, or heretic. We clearly have a long way to go in our dialogue on the climate crisis.
Laudate Deum is an important addition to the emerging corpus of environmental thought in the Catholic Church. The Popes and bishops have addressed various aspects of integral ecology for over 75 years. Laudato Si’ synthesizes that prior work into a new focus within our social doctrine. As Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII opened up the modern topic of labor and capital in the 1890’s for moral consideration, Laudato Si’ has done the same for the environment today. Future popes are certain to add to this body of writing because the environment will continue to be a major issue for humanity in coming decades. In that regard, Laudate Deum is the first of many Church commentaries on our progress in caring for our common home.
In the next few weeks, we will explore Laudate Deum in more detail. You are welcome to read the document yourself at the link above. Forward this note to some friends for more discussion!
The Pope really wants us to make painful sacrifices and deep changes. Unusual for someone in the repentance and redemption business!
There are lots of unserious suggestions I could make about how we could do what is needed in the US, but in a serious vein, I expect that we will continue to resist until adaptation and migration are the only available solutions. Hilarity ensues, as they used to say.
"The Pope did not give us a letter grade, but it would probably be a D minus trending to an F." - hahaha. Good piece, looking forward to learning about this one!