Laudato Si' Archives - Bob on Books

Earlier this week I had the chance to hear Cardinal Peter Turkson speak on Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si’ “. At one point he talked about the beginning of his concern for the creation. It was when he was growing up in Ghana (he is African) and saw the degradation to his beautiful land caused by the surface manganese mines.

In that moment I realized I had something in common with Cardinal Turkson. I grew up in Youngstown. I saw the stark contrast between the Mill Creek watershed, and the river into which it flowed–the Mahoning. I watched how on one hand we were thankful for the clouds of smoke over the valley that represented jobs and paychecks and how we fled to the park or places like Pymatuning or Cook’s Forest for cleaner air whenever we could.

I realized that seeing these things was the beginning of my concern for the creation, what Pope Francis calls caring for our common home. I know lots of people these days argue back and forth about the science or how rigid our environmental standards should be when jobs are at stake. I find the idea of caring for our common home far more compelling.

Let’s take Youngstown. A number of you who read these posts do so because you loved growing up in Youngstown, and for some you love it so much you still live there. I have friends working for the renewal of neighborhoods in various parts of the city.

What do we love about the city? Of course there is all that good food. But beyond this, here are some of the things I think of:

The fact that there are so many vantage points where one can see across the valley and see much of the city, day or night.
I think of the hill above downtown with St. Columba’s Cathedral and First Presbyterian Church overlooking downtown, and as it were, blessing the city.
I think of St. Elizabeth’s by the freeway, inviting the sick and the injured to find solace and healing.
I think of the river, slowly becoming the site of restaurants. Could it be a place of walking trails, fountains similar to the riverfronts in many cities?
Of course there are the lakes and trails and pavilions of Mill Creek Park. Lanterman’s Mill and Suicide Hill, the Silver Bridge and Fellows Gardens.

It seems that this is a time when Youngstown can have a new beginning…or fall prey to outside interests who would degrade it once more. It has taken 30 years to clean up the sites of the old mills, “brownfields” in environmental terms, and begin to develop new businesses. The old Ward bakery has been converted to artists studios. Downtown is coming back in a new form.

Cities take decades to develop or re-develop. Youngstown is particularly vulnerable to predators who think the city so desperate for jobs that it will allow those big interests access to the natural resources of the city and degrade them.

Youngstown has the chance to both attract businesses with its location, tax incentives and low overheads and do this in a way that is safe for our land, air, water, and people. Both are possible. We had a hundred years of trading the beauty and health of the Valley for jobs. If we care for our common home we won’t let that happen again. There’s too much we love and count precious.

What do you love about Youngstown that you believe is worth preserving and enhancing?

OSU President Michael Drake, Cardinal Peter Turkson, and Dean Bruce McPheron

On Monday, I posted a review of “Laudato Si’ “, Pope Francis’s encyclical on caring for our common home. This wasn’t by accident. I read the encyclical in preparation for a lecture at The Ohio State University by Cardinal Peter Turkson. He is the President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and led the drafting of the encyclical. He is the first Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church from Ghana.

His lecture was an exposition of the encyclical, the distinctive of which is a call for an integral ecology that brings together both natural ecology and human ecology. He contended our relationship with God, each other, and the earth is intimately connected. Therefore, he stated that this is not an encyclical on climate change per se’, but rather a social encyclical that links our treatment of the earth and our treatment of the poor, who often suffer the most from environmental degradation even though they have done the least to cause this.

There were several things he brought out that illumined and enriched my own reading of the encyclical:

He mentioned that the characteristic word the encyclical uses for our relationship to the creation is care rather than stewardship, a term that is used only twice in the encyclical. While stewardship focuses on responsibility and answerability, care has to do with love, and resonated with my sense of how important it is that we recover a sense of and a love of place, particularly the place where we make our home.
He emphasized the encyclical’s call for an ecological conversion, and spoke of the need for the change of direction in our lives that comes with repentance from sin–strong words for a university audience. It struck me that this call penetrates to the heart of our challenge, which is ultimately not one of more scientific evidence, or just new technologies, as importance as these may be, but a fundamental change in our direction in how we think about both creation and our fellow human beings across the globe.
A third concept he discussed was that of justice, which he defined as “respecting the demands of the relationship in which we exist.” I can see the implications this has both for how we relate to the creation and to our fellow human beings. In terms of this encyclical, an injustice to one is really an injustice to both.

He concluded with his hopes that this encyclical and similar statements from other religious bodies will give the world’s leaders that backbone they need to reach a binding agreement on climate change at this December’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. I have to confess that he seemed more hopeful than I am of progress on this front.

The question I found myself wondering about is why there isn’t more talk of mobilizing Catholic and other religious bodies toward the kind of ecological conversion of which the encyclical speaks. There are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, or 16 percent of the world’s population. The encyclical reaches out to the wider human community as well, and has been responded to with interest from other religious communities. How many people does it take before an idea of caring for our common home reaches the “tipping point”? It doesn’t seem to me that political leaders respond to documents, even if they bear the papal imprimatur. What they do respond to is movements of the people. Gandhi, King, Mandela, and Walesa all led people movements shaped deeply by religious principles. Might we not hope and pray and work for such a movement around what arguably is the most important challenge to face humanity yet–protecting our common home for our children?