1. a letter addressed by the pope to all the bishops of the church.
2. (of a letter) intended for a wide or general circulation; general.
3. a letter from the Pope to the Roman Catholic clergy on matters of doctrine or other concerns of the Church to be read from the pulpit.
anthropocentric:
1. Regarding humans as the central element of the universe.
2. Interpreting reality exclusively in terms of human values and experience.
You don't get much more anthropocentrically centered than the Judeo-Christian belief that God created the entire world to serve man's every need. There are plenty of passages found in the Bible that lend support and rationalization for this belief. Take for example the following verses.
First Genesis 1:26 -
Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.' (from the New International Version (NIV)Then there is Genesis 1:28 (from the New International Version (NIV)
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”Genesis 9:1-29 (from the English Standard Version)
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. ...All of these versus lend credence to the notion that God intended man to be in control of the environment around him.
It is not at all uncommon for ecologists to challenge anthropocentrism. Here at the Church of the Holy Shitters we steadfastly and routinely do just that.
But it's something else for the pontiff of the Catholic Church to do it. But that is what Pope Francis did in his latest Encyclical Letter - Laudato SI'. The significance of this letter cannot be overstated.
And the Pope has plenty of biblical references to bolster his own argument challenging anthropocentrism.
Here are a few examples:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” (Genesis 2:15)
“You shall not pollute the land in which you live…. You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I also dwell; for I the LORD dwell among the Israelites.”
(Numbers 35:33-34)
“The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers, the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth; its inhabitants suffer for their guilt.” (Isaiah 24:4-6)
“You have polluted the land with your whoring and wickedness. Therefore the showers have been withheld, and the spring rain has not come.” (Jeremiah 3:2-3)I recently took the time to read this encyclical in its entirety. I wanted to know first-hand what the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics had to say about climate change and man's obligations to resolve this man-made problem.
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Note: All quotes of the encyclical letter are taken from the official transcript. It is quite a lengthy document but well worth the time to read. This diary, although lengthy itself, contains only a small portion of the territory covered in the encyclical.
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Pope Francis acknowledges the problem of anthropocentricity in just the second paragraph of his recent encyclical when he says:
We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.And as you might guess the Pope couches this egocentric mindset in terms of sin.
“For human beings… to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life – these are sins”. For “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God”.And he accurately goes on to say:
If present trends continue, this century may well witness extraordinary climate change and an unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences for all of us. A rise in the sea level, for example, can create extremely serious situations, if we consider that a quarter of the world’s population lives on the coast or nearby, and that the majority of our megacities are situated in coastal areas.And he admirably identifies the importance of addressing the needs of the poor as it relates to climate change.
Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited. For example, changes in climate, to which animals and plants cannot adapt, lead them to migrate; this in turn affects the livelihood of the poor, who are then forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children. There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever.He goes on accurately to list the problems of fresh clean water, the loss of biodiversity, the decline in the quality of human life and the increase in global inequality. He points out the breakdown of society and the weak response to date of addressing all these problems.
He makes special mention of the increasing rate of change taking place in our societies.
The continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet is coupled today with a more intensified pace of life and work which might be called “rapidification”.And he does a good job of pointing out this rapidification is coupled with super-consumerism.
But a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.And finally, he points out the fallacy of blaming over-population exclusively for the problem.
To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.No one can fault the Pope for analyzing the problem of climate change through the eyes of the position he holds; that of being the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. As I read the encyclical I kept this in mind as I traveled down the path of his logic. His insights and analysis of the problem of anthropogenic climate change is groundbreaking and a huge step forward for the Catholic Church and the community of faith as a whole.
But that spiritual perspective must be recognized for what it is. A fundamental orientation of perception that filters all thought through the lens of faith. And this lens of faith limits and blinds the pontiff from clearly analyzing certain human aspects of this human caused problem.
Follow below for an examination of these limits and blindspots.