In his Tractates on the Gospel of John, Saint Augustine writes, “The confession of evil works is the beginning of good works.”[1] Pope Francis operates according to this Augustinian principle when in Laudato Si he repeatedly models penitence for our current ecological crisis. Public admissions of guilt are so foreign to our permissive culture that even confessing Catholics cringe at the Pope’s penitential rhetoric. Surely it isn’t I, Pope Francis! Not me! I would never... We’ve all heard this thrice denial—from Saint Peter no less—but, as Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church assert, human sin is always at the root of suffering, destruction, and death (see Romans 6:23; Catechism of the Catholic Church 2418).[2] And, as Augustine and Pope Francis teach us, respectively: confession is the first step toward our own sacramental salvation and the care of our temporary home.
Pope Francis operates in this spirit of confessionalism throughout his most recent encyclical. Indeed, Laudato Si resounds fully of our Church’s liturgical Confiteor: “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault [insert chest pounding here].” Self-culpability is a predominant theme in this papal exhortation, and it is this Mea Culpa that has caused such a clamor amongst climate-change critics who question the validity of the science and the corresponding proclamations of guilt. To correct the miseries in our souls and on our planet caused by our human frailty, we do well to begin with an ecological Confiteor such as our pope suggests. Pope Francis asks us to turn away from our “unrestrained delusions of grandeur”—a posture that assumes an unremorseful innocence even after the fall of Adam and Eve—and instead dwell in the reality of our originally inherited sinfulness.
Despite the “obstructionist attitudes” (Pope Francis’s harsh language, not mine), Laudato Si insists that humans have played a role in the ruination of the planet through a disproportionate attachment to sin—greed, ingratitude, wastefulness, indifference, rampant individualism. As with any sustainable ecosystem, balance is in order: in our spiritual milieu, our vices must be counterweighed by our virtues. Pope Francis insists, “[W]hen there is a general breakdown in the exercise of a certain virtue in personal and social life, it ends up causing a number of imbalances, including environmental ones.” This papal document thereby offers a road map—an Examination of Conscience, if you will—that we can apply to our personal circumstances as we confess our guilty habits of living, adopt new eco-friendly lifestyles, and live more peaceably and simply during our temporal existence on earth.
In our daily Mass, we confess together in first-person remorse that, “I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.” It is a modern inclination to diminish the role of sin in our daily lives, and yet the Confiteor brings to light the gripping darkness of evil in our actions and in our hurtful omissions. Catholic teaching maintains a belief in concupiscence from which none of us is spared regardless of the scientific consensus on global temperatures. In our Mass offerings and in our Daily Examen, we are called to ask, “How am I culpable for the miseries of the world around me?” “What have I done?” “What have I failed to do?”
Laudato Si challenges us to assume self-responsibility even where we might not immediately see the reverberating effects of our sinfulness. “Our goal,” writes Pope Francis, “is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.” Here, we are urged toward a “painful awareness” and a “personal suffering” that is antithetical to a world of comfortable oblivion and hedonistic individualism that, sadly, have become the hallmarks of twenty-first–century (post)modernity. This daring assumption of the via dolorosa is not one that a de-Christianized world understands or accepts, yet it is this very inversion of secular values in favor of humility, spiritual sobriety, and penance that Francis exhorts.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the saints and holy people is their intense remorse over their sinfulness and their acute awareness of the devastating global effects of their imperfections. In her Dialogues Saint Catherine of Siena passionately accuses her own glaring faults for having brought destruction to the Holy Church and to the entire world. Saint John-Baptiste-Marie Vianney spent up to sixteen hours a day as a priest in the confessional since he believed that “it is sin that brings upon us all calamities, all scourges, war, famine, pestilence, earthquakes, fires, frost, hail, storms—all that afflicts us, all that makes us miserable.” Saint Gemma Galgani often repented of her “innumerable sins” and asked God to give to her the sufferings of Christ to save others who did not recognize their own sinfulness in the world. Thomas Merton confesses in The Seven Storey Mountain that his disordered passions caused the terrors of World War II. In his Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI writes and Francis cites, “Every violation of solidarity and civil friendship harms the environment.”[3] Far from hyperbolic humility, the saints understood what many of us fail to comprehend: sin is the cause of ecological and spiritual havoc. Noble Prize–winning novelist Sigrid Undset captures the reality of the contagion of sins when she writes in her biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, “In the eyes of the saints the clouds of dust of small sins, which we scarcely notice, are always visible in the glow of the light from above.”[4]
It is tempting to think that the problems of our contemporary ecosystem are insurmountable or impossible for a single person to address or remediate. Francis condemns this insidious line of thinking and offers hopeful encouragement toward a reconciled futurity. Just as the effects of our sinfulness have far-reaching consequences, our confessional penances offered up through good deeds and intentions have the potential to wash away the grit and grime and eroding sediments of evil. Pope Francis gives us the archetype of Noah whose singular example provided humanity a pathway to redemption, to which Francis exclaims, “All it takes is one good person to restore hope!” Our papal father invokes his namesake, Saint Francis, as a model of ecological living when he recounts Saint Bonaventure’s observation that “through universal reconciliation with every creature, Saint Francis in some way returned to the state of original innocence.”[5] Further, the Little Flower, Saint Thérèse, serves as a paragon of what Francis terms an “integral ecology” with her emphasis on the “Little Way of Spiritual Childhood.” Through daily acts of kindness, gestures of peace and friendship, and a childlike trust in God’s love, Pope Francis assures us that we might “break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness” that typify the worst of today’s secular interactions. But before this ecological integrity is restored, as the Penitential Rite confirms, we must first call to mind our sins.
There are indeed conflicting messages throughout Laudato Si: an emphasis on a “global system” of remediation which seems to contradict the Church’s teaching on subsidiarity; a message that asks humans to get over themselves while also asking humans to recognize their inherent dignity; and a strong condemnation of a scientific-technological universe while simultaneously prescribing a globalized technocratic solution. Nonetheless, the pedagogical usefulness of our pope’s recent teaching document is showcased more by what it does than by what it says: Laudato Si offers a public confession of guilt, a Confiteor of ecological proportions. Where a political strategist might mock such a confessional posture (i.e., the “Apology Tour” of President Obama’s inaugural trips throughout the world), the Church offers a countercultural paradigm of self-culpability that is often difficult to explain to a secular audience steeped as it is in the “virtues” of materiality, power, or self-advancement. Instead, Laudato Si offers an example of what a confessional examination looks like in its emphasis on humility, self-abnegation, and repentance. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
[1] St. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John; tractate XII on John 3:6-21, § 13.
[2] Romans 6:23; CCC 2418.
[3] Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (29 June 2009), 51: AAS 101 (2009), 687.
[4] Sigrid Undset, Catherine of Siena, 151.
[5] Cf. Bonaventure, The Major Legend of Saint Francis, VIII, 1, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 2, New York-London-Manila, 2000, 586.
Finally, I've made a list of some of the practical suggestions that Pope Francis outlines in this encyclical that each of us as individuals or communities might implement to help our ecological environs. As our pope encourages, small actions save the world (see section #212).
1) Modeled after the example of St. Francis, we might make our own friary gardens that consist of wild flowers or plants indigenous to our own part of the world.
2) Recycle paper.
3) Recycle food waste (i.e., compost).
4) Limit our use of air conditioning.
5) Support the work of farmers, and perhaps do our own "tilling and keeping" (see section #67).
6) Participate in the Jubilee tradition of mercy, forgiveness.
7) Participate in food coops.
8) Develop an aesthetic sensibility that appreciates beauty through poetry, literature, the religious classics.
9) Dialogue across a discussion (i.e., do not engage in "absolutization").
10) Avoid excessive or compulsive consumerism.
11) Boycott products or services antithetical to God's laws.
12) Engage in and contribute to environmental education vis-a-vis Christian catechesis.
13) Strive for ecological citizenship.
14) Use less heating by wearing warm clothes or layers.
15) Avoid plastic and paper products when possible (and, if you do use these items, recycle).
16) Reduce water consumption.
17) Separate refuse.
18) Do not waste consumable food.
19) Carpool or use public transportation.
20) Plant more trees.
21) Turn off lights.
22) Pray before and after meals, giving all glory and thanks to God for all of our earthly blessings.
23) Look to the example of St. Therese of Lisieux, who practiced the little way of an integral ecology.
24) Look to the example of St. Joseph, who worked tirelessly for his family in humility, meekness, and devotion.
25) Kindness shatters the logic of violence.
26) Show a proactive concern for public places, buildings, fountains, parks, monuments, or squares. Make our communities beautiful.
27) Cultivate an interior beauty both within ourselves and within our own homes. Even in the most impoverished areas, our homes can offer a small interior sanctuary from the grit of an urban landscape.
28) Practice the sacraments!
29) Rest on Sunday, the Lord's Day. Through contemplative silence or stillness might we find peace...
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