Ten years after Laudato si’, people still observe climate crises and, simultaneously, widespread apathy. How can educators foster ecological conversion that motivates care for creation? Pope Francis views environmental degradation as a breakdown of relationships. Care for creation, therefore, requires major shifts in culture, spiritual practice, and cultivation of ecological virtues. Praxis pedagogy helps students embody integral ecology. Beyond the principles of Catholic social teaching, integral ecology becomes part of their habitus. This paper examines integral ecology through two case studies: Bethlehem Farm (West Virginia, US) and Mes de Misión (Tacna, Peru). Assessing these service immersion projects, the author contends that teaching integral ecology effectively involves these best practices: Foster a culture of care; create opportunities for encounter; live in community; share meals; empower hard work; gather graces. Integral ecology provides a common language useful for explicit programming, preparation, and follow-up. The conclusion offers possibilities for implementing best practices locally.
For centuries, capital punishment served as a precedent within Catholic social thought for the justification of other sanctions, including punitive war and punitive mutilation. If the state could execute criminals, surely it had the right to impose other penalties that were not necessarily lethal? Ironically, support for these two punishments waned, either explicitly or implicitly, within Catholic social teaching well before the recent developments in papal teaching on the death penalty. Today, Catholic teaching on capital punishment reverses the earlier paradigm and provides an argument against the legitimacy of these sanctions. The comparative history of these developments provides a useful case study in the evolution of Catholic social thought, illustrating how change can come through the deliberate excision of or the failure to reiterate a long-standing ethical judgment—that is, through pruning or silence.
Amid increased global concern about climate change and intensified political polarization, the Catholic Church is well positioned to bring public attention to environmental ecology and the common good. Public Catholicism finds renewed opportunity with post-secularity and the expanded space it creates for moderate religious actors to articulate ethical grounds for collective actions toward remedying societal problems. Focusing primarily on Laudato si’, the author shows that it exemplifies the multistranded, culturally accessible reasoning and pluralistic communicative style that befits postsecular expectations. While noting the contextual impediments that restrict public reception of Vatican discourse, the author argues that the consistency between Church discourse and actions on climate change and related issues bolsters the Church’s postsecular credibility to nudge nonpartisan public awareness of the issues at stake. The author suggests that the relatively young, religiously unaffiliated population—those most alert to the climate crisis—may be especially receptive to the Church’s moral leadership.
The World Council of Churches and the permanent observer of the Holy See to the UN were significantly active during the negotiations prior to the adoption of Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This paper uses the five speeches of the popes at the UN to analyze the coincidences and differences of the Catholic model of development with the one derived from the 2030 Agenda. The Catholic model is synthesized in eight features: transcendent, human, integral, solidarity, charitable-true, equalizing, endogenous, and sustainable. It coincides with that of the UN in terms of the centrality of people, planet, (shared) prosperity, peace, and partnership. It offers differences by elevation when considering a transcendent and integral anthropology; a concordance in solidarity, equalizing, endogenous, and ecological; and a common basis in the values of justice and peace, although not in those of love and truth proper to Catholic social thought.
The theme of land has largely been neglected in Christian social ethics in Africa. Although a growing body of theological literature exists on Africa’s ecological challenges, the topic of land as a unique category for understanding Africa’s social history and current developmental predicament has not received significant attention. This article examines the ongoing crisis of land in Africa, with a focus on the problem of land dispossession and displacement. In arguing for theological and pastoral involvement of the Church in Africa in the discourse on land, land justice, and agrarian reform, this article draws key insights from the Salvadoran archbishop and martyr Oscar Romero’s theology and pastoral praxis in relation to land and agrarian reform in El Salvador. Romero’s theology and praxis on land reform are rooted in Catholic social teaching and can illumine the theological and pastoral commitment of the Church in Africa in light of Africa’s land troubles.
In examining the US Catholic bishops’ election statements since 1976, the author argues that the bishops are promoting an increasingly ecclesial, as opposed to personalist, view of conscience. Whereas their presentation of conscience formation once encouraged individuals to form their own consciences to make decisions well, the bishops have come to assume for themselves the responsibility for forming the laity’s consciences. An update is overdue, as the present election statement was written in 2015. Incorporating Pope Francis’s understanding of encounter would make the bishops’ next election statement more balanced and more helpful in the exercise of faithful citizenship.
This paper explores the tension confronted by the Catholic Church as it seeks to maintain relevance amid accelerating secularism. The author introduces the concept of postsecularity, and the opportunity and challenge it presents for the Church as it navigates the current moment and its own institutional identity and public relevance. Focusing on Francis’s papacy, the author highlights the pope’s appreciation of everyday secular realities and how, in addition to amplifying the Church’s long-standing social justice tradition, his convening of synods on topical issues and his openness to doctrinal discernment on sexual morality aligned with postsecular expectations. By contrast, the Vatican’s lack of openness to evaluating any element in its multistranded reasoning on women’s exclusion from ordination signifies a clear limitation in the Church’s postsecular capacity. The preemptive evasion of reflexive dialogue among stakeholders misses an opportunity to further strengthen the core presence of the Eucharist in Catholic theology and community.
This article draws on Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential theory of practice and employs it as a framework to analyze community organizing, focusing on the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky. As a practice in MacIntyre’s sense, it argues, community organizing constitutes a teleological form of social activity that is oriented toward distinctive kinds of “internal goods” and that functions to develop new capacities within its practitioners to recognize, desire, and attain those goods, relying on standards of excellence, characteristic institutions, and its own “tradition” of practice. Such a MacIntyrean analysis of organizing foregrounds its ethical character as a practice and tradition of practice, informed by larger moral-cultural traditions. It also shows how organizing embodies, in practice, the core principles of the Catholic social tradition. Thus, it enables a clearer articulation of the conceptual and historical relationship between community organizing and the Catholic social tradition, and lays a theoretical foundation for further dialogue.
Many Catholics living in violent conflict zones or in situations of structural injustice, along with Pax Christi International, Maryknoll, Pope Francis, and others, have been cultivating a tectonic shift toward centering active nonviolence in Catholic social ethics and approaches to conflict. This essay will illuminate how Catholic community organizing and strategic campaigns can both contribute to this shift and be enhanced by such a shift. The first part will describe salient features of this shift in Catholic theology and social ethics. The second part will assess components of Catholic community organizing and strategic campaigns that distinctly contribute to this shift. The third part will offer some initial suggestions for how centering nonviolence can enhance Catholic community organizing and strategic campaigns. In turn, these dynamics between centering nonviolence and Catholic community organizing can better illuminate the way of Jesus and the love of Christ in both the Church and societies.
There is a pressing need for a theological approach to community organizing that addresses two key problems: burnout among organizers and an unwillingness of ecclesial institutions to commit to authentic structural change. What is needed is a new, practical theology that spiritually sustains organizers and convinces decision-makers of the centrality of community organizing for the life of the Church. The authors propose a reinterpretation of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s meditation on the call of the eternal king in the Spiritual Exercises, in which Jesus invites all to join the social project of the Reign of God. This call comes not just to individuals but to a communion of saints whose efforts throughout history contextualize current actions within the broader synodal march of the People of God toward integral liberation.
This paper explores the theological underpinnings of Pope Francis’s messages to world meetings of popular movements as a way to discern his theology of organizing. In these messages, one encounters Francis’s social teaching, which is rooted in the preferential option for the poor and marginalized. Beyond an epistemological privilege of the poor long embraced in liberation theology, Francis looks to the agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of the poor to locate God’s action in history. He models a theological methodology attentive to the concrete experiences and struggles of those on the peripheries. From there, Francis points to the solidarity, resistance, and disruptive agency of grassroots movements as an expression of the Gospel. He describes the circle of praxis in a way that emphasizes encounter, solidarity, and urgency to act, summarized in his insistence that the “future of humanity” lies “in the hands of peoples and in their ability to organize.”
