Pope Francis and Earth Day 2025

Our Common Home

Pope Francis and Earth Day 2025

On Easter Monday 2025 the lead story in every newspaper is that Pope Francis is dead. I read the headlines, and glancing above my desk, see a copy of what I believe is one of the most important documents of our age. Laudato Si, the encyclical Francis offered a decade ago as a word of concern and hope.

Speaking of the natural world as “our common home” Laudato Si, simply means “praise be to you.” It is offered as a diagnosis, a prayer, a remedy for the health our good earth. Educated as a scientist and theologian, Francis offers carefully researched science linked with finely crafted moral guidelines. Part science, part ethics, and part poetry this is a call for honest attention and constructive action around the changes to our climate.

Here is an example of science and faith in conversation, each respectfully engaging the other. Science, thickly presented; moral theology merged in an appeal for an open “integral ecology.” Environmental activist Bill McKibben writes this “is arguably the most important piece of writing so far this millennium.”

Here is one summary sentence: “We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” It is the poor and refugee who already suffer, first and most, from ignoring the treatment to our common home.

Late in 2023 I was privileged to travel to Argentina. The most popular personage was not Pope Francis.  Images of another Argentinian, soccer (futbol) star Lionell Messi, were seen on every block. Shops were full of Messi’s jerseys (#10 or #30). Shops were filled with bobblehead dolls of Messi for sale; and nearby, a few were available of Pope Francis. When I asked a shopkeeper why? She whispered, “some are upset with the pope.”  More on that later.

In Buenos Aires we visited Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio’s assignment prior to the papacy. The Metropolitan Cathedral faces the Plaza de Mayo. At the other end of the plaza is the Casa Rosada (Argentina’s White House). The plaza is where the Mothers of the Disappeared gathered to protest during the “dirty war” (1976 to 1983) when it is estimated 30,000 young people were “disappeared” by the military junta in charge. The Mothers offered a human rights witness, a statement against the dictator.

This plaza is still a place where resistance to authoritarianism is on display. During our visit “stones of remembrance” were being placed around the statue of General Manuel Belgrino, leader of the fight for independence in the early 19^th Century.  These stones today are an expression of grief for the more the 100,000 who had died of COVID as national leaders failed to respond.

Pope Francis knew this history, the struggles for human rights and the dilemmas of the poor. He believed in the connection of all people and creation and chose the name “Francis,” as signal St. Francis of Assisi would be a guide star.

In 2023 Argentina’s presidential election saw the ascendency of the flamboyant “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Melei, who lifted a chain saw during his campaign as example of his fight against what he called the evils of “collectivism” and the idiocy of “social justice.” Melei called Francis an “imbecile” for his efforts to aid the poor.

There was said to be a reconciliation in February 2024 when President Melei met with Pope Francis in Rome. Even so, a year later, in early 2025, Elon Musk stood on stage joining with Melei as Musk put on his own chainsaw routine to suggest that social programs in the U.S. should be cut out and destroyed with his DOGE efforts.

Returning to the shop keeper who spoke of some who were disappointed with the pope, she went on to say that Argentinians were most unhappy when in 2019 Francis visited Brazil and Chile but had “flown over” his own nation.  Ah, yes, Francis critiqued for not touching down in Argentina!  Nationalism alive and well… all around the world.

There is irony in the fact that one of the last visitors with Pope Francis prior to his death was U.S. Vice President JD Vance, a recent Catholic convert. Vance disagrees with the witness of Pope Francis on climate change, immigration, refugees, the war in Ukraine, to name only a few. Has JD Vance read Laudato Si?  Does the current U.S. Administration know of this work?  If so, what of the closing of USAID? Do any of the “faith leaders” surrounding our president offer a witness that considers the poor of our world or the climate crisis we face?

Some pundits today suggest Pope Francis has not changed the lyrics of the Catholic Church, just the music.  By this it is meant he didn’t transform specific dogma on abortion, homosexuality, or the role of women.  I believe he nudged us toward the future. Perhaps he moved these concerns from music in minor to a major key.

Changing the structures and practices of millennial old institutions is a one-hundred-year or two-hundred-year endeavor.  What we have been privileged to witness in Francis is one broken, open man, who gave himself fully for others in the hope of healing of our world.