In a captivating paper, Pope Francis urges the world to make the current state of the environment a central moral issue. The paper, called "Laudato Si" has been greeted with raving reviews from environmental activists around the world.
The document, which as released last Thursday June 18, 2015, addresses several key environmental issues, such as global warming. Pope Francis urges that the Catholic community put caring for the environment as the center of Catholic social teaching. The Pope also tackled the difficult task of restructuring global warming from a scientific problem to a broad ethical problem.
In his paper the Pope writes, "Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years." Pope Francis goes on to say "The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth."
Many critics praised the Pope's boldness in addressing every living person on the planet, not just the rich and not just the poor. The document urges everyone to hear both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, and warns them of the damage being caused by compulsive consumerism which is both wasteful and single-minded.
However, many who have read the paper believe that the heart of Pope Francis' argument is the concept of "integral ecology." This particular concept revolves around the environment having a more central role in longstanding Catholic social teaching by linking destruction of nature with injustices such as poverty, hunger, inequality and violations of human dignity.
The Pope goes on to cite the deforestation of the Amazon, the melting of the Arctic glaciers and the deaths of coral reefs as to rebuke obstructionist climate doubters who, by the Pope's own words, "seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms."
According to Miami Herald, Pope Francis favors those who live the "less is more" lifestyle and urges politics to begin listening less to the oil industry interests and more to the scriptures.
There are those, however, who are skeptic of the Pope's words. Concerns of drastic change in the ways of society, namely the discontinuing of fossil fuel use, would hurt the poor more than the upper-class has been made known to his holiness.
The "Laudato Si" has been so popular since its release, with #LaudatoSi landing a spot in the trending list on social media.