I know well that the mere fact of mentioning the Pope leads to mockery in certain circles. Too bad ! It’s Christmas, so I’m taking a chance.
Last October 4, on the occasion of the feast of Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and environmentalists, Pope Francis gave, in Rome, an apostolic exhortation entitled Praise God (Médiaspaul, 2023, 52 pages) and addressed “to all people of good will on the climate crisis”.
This short text is presented as a sequel to the resounding encyclical letter Praised be youpublished in 2015. In the latter, Francis, engaging the Church in the fight against global warming, fervently denounced “obsessive consumerism” and the “techno-economic paradigm” which, with contempt for nature and the poor, destroy the world.
The time has come, Francis wrote then, to listen to “both the clamor of the earth and the clamor of the poor” and to adopt, collectively, in the name of universal solidarity, a joyful sobriety.
The Pope, it was common knowledge, was not heard by “the great economic powers, concerned with the greatest profit at the least cost in the shortest possible time”. However, Jorge Mario Bergoglio did not choose to be called François for nothing. This name, he said at the time of his election in 2013, meant the choice of poverty and hope. Discouragement, therefore, is not on his agenda.
By its title, Praise God could ward off atheists and those refractory to faith who believe that this text is not for them. They would be wrong. François, in fact, is not good at pranks. In this text, the section on “spiritual motivations” of ecological commitment, otherwise solid, only occupies 10% of the whole. Praise Godin other words, is first and foremost an ardent plea, full of poetry and particularly well written, for the urgent ecological conversion of all humans.
The climate crisis, Francis writes, is no longer “a secondary or ideological question”, but “a tragedy which harms everyone”, a “global social problem which is intimately linked to the dignity of human life”. We can no longer deny the reality of climate change and its human origin. The planet is doing badly, François continues, and it is not because of the poor who have too many children, but because of the rich who defile it with their abuse.
“It is the rich who warm the planet, not the poor,” wrote Francis Vailles in The Press of December 30, 2021. And these rich people are not just the billionaires. In Quebec, for example, the group of the richest 10% ($91,600 and more per year) emits 31 tonnes of GHGs per person annually, “or six times more than the least fortunate 50%,” specifies the journalist.
How ? By its general consumption, its large cars, its chalets, its trips and its investments. The big rich, obviously, add more. In Canada, members of the richest 1% emit 190 tonnes annually per person. While some admire and envy them, they play arsonists.
The lure of financial gain, therefore, is at the source of the pillaging and squandering of natural resources which only benefits a minority. This predatory impulse is part of what François, with Heideggerian accents, calls the “technocratic paradigm”, which consists of thinking that “reality, good and truth [surgissent] spontaneously from technological and economic power itself. Man comes to believe that all “non-human reality is a simple resource at his service” and that the increase in his power towards it is necessarily a good thing.
However, Francis wrote in Praised be you, “we are not God. The land precedes us and was given to us so that we cultivate it with respect. “The world around us,” he adds today, “is not an object of exploitation, of unbridled use, of unlimited ambitions.” Even more, nature is not a “framework” in which we act, “we are included in it” and our action, to be ethical, must ensure that it preserves the balance of the whole for the rest of the world. world.
The Judeo-Christian and Western vision attributes a “particular and central value” to the human being in the cosmos, but, the Pope specifies, only a “situated anthropomorphism”, which recognizes that “human life is incomprehensible and unsustainable without the other creatures,” is morally acceptable.
It is therefore important to be reconciled “with the world that welcomes us” to save it, to save ourselves. The adoption of a more humble way of life and, above all, firmer energy transition policies are therefore essential.
If we don’t go green, white Christmases will melt away.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.