The Pope's recent encyclical on saving the planet is ground-breaking simply by the subject matter chosen, so perhaps for that reason alone, it has attracted a lot of attention.
There has been a lot of negative reaction. The Pope? Environment? The juxtaposition doesn't compute, it's not his business, he can't blame capitalism for the deteriorating state of our air, water, and earth. A lot of this comes from the same people who are challenged in the encyclical: climate-change deniers, for example, and commercial-industrial interests who suggest that a profitable end justifies any means.
However, environmentalists have good reason to be pleased by most of the points the Pope makes, and The National Catholic Reporter approves the Pop's message and interprets it as a "challenge to the rich."
I think it's great for the Pope to express his view. He unquestionably has global influence, and if he can help to make saving the environment a moral issue, he may be able to add impetus and urgency to the movement toward change.
Perhaps, though, he has missed a trick. His suggestions - and those of many other environmental activists - really treat the symptoms of our environmental problems rather than the root cause. For example, I myself often rail against "Big Oil" and the profits they reap, yet at the same time I have to acknowledge that they couldn't keep on doing what they do without the excuse of a very real and seemingly insatiable demand for energy. Burning fossil fuels is a symptom, but overextended human population growth is the root cause of nearly all the various ways in which we homos-not-so-sapiens foul our own nest.
That's why I read the lengthy "Laudato si" encyclical in full. [Evidently the authoritative final English version isn't yet available but you can find a translation of the pre-release version, dated May 24, on www.papalencyclicals.net.] It's a page-turner (really!) with a lot of good thinking on environmental issues, but given the centrality of population in the save-the-world equation, I particularly wanted to see whether Francis might consider revoking/revising the 1968 encyclical referred to as "Humanae vitae," which reaffirmed the Roman Catholic church's ban on artificial birth control. That would indeed be a find, something to get excited about!
I don't expect to find it, and I didn't. Instead, there was this, in Paragraph 120:
Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties? “If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of the new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away”.
Well, I suppose that's palpably and predictably papal. But for me, particularly if "everything is interrelated," how can we possibly exclude rampant population growth from consideration as we seek to pin down the relationship between the finite and the infinite?