Ever since I was a boy, I have loved the night. Short-sighted as I was, I found that moving about in the darkness of my rural home village put matters on a more even playing field, as it were, with all those who could see much more clearly than I could in the daylight. In fact, mix a little fog into the darkness and I was in heaven; no one else could then see any better than I could.
What Pope Francis has set down in this Encyclical is not perfect; as some have already pointed out it leaves out the idea that an ever-expanding global population is ecologically unsustainable even with greater care of the planet. However it is a a more far-reaching statement about the connection between the health of the planet and the health of humanity than I have ever known to have be written by any religious leader of comparable authority. Yes, it is a religious treatise but it is also an environmental one and even – as he draws heavily upon biology, chemistry, ecology, and climatology – a scientific one.
To say that Pope Francis’ “Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality; On Care for Our Common Home” was shocking to many would be as remarkable an understatement as his words were a breath of fresh air to many who had never expected such a dramatic message of environmental conservation to come from such a place of global power as the pontificate of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet that is precisely what happened.