Some Philosophical Remarks on the Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’

Abstract

In this paper, I aim at interpreting the project of the encyclical as a sort of paradigmatic turn in the way of conceiving Christian faith. At paragraph 49, it is underlined that a “true ecological approach always becomes a social approach” and this implies the need of hearing “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor”. In my view, by uniting the two categories of “nature/creation” and “poverty”, the encyclical implicitly builds an ideal bridge between Pope Francis’ paradigmatic turn and that “political turn” invoked by the Catholic theologian J. B. Metz from the end of the sixties through the proposal of a “New Political Theology”. Indeed, the excesses of the neo-liberal paradigm and the perverse effects of a certain organization of global market pushes Christianity to act by involving all social, cultural and religious actors, in order to fight against all the forms of suffering and dehumanization of contemporary society. I’m also interested in underlining some weak aspects of Pope’s ecological approach.