The strongest parts of Laudato Si’, the latest papal encyclical, are the first sections of Chapter Three, “The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” where Pope Francis addresses the quest for limitless power that has been the dominant ambition of the Western world since the Renaissance: power over nature, and—since, as he points out, humanity is a part of nature—power over human society and the individual persons who compose it.  While acknowledging the benefits science and technology have brought in recent centuries, Francis reminds us that “nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired, have given us tremendous power.  More precisely, they have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world.  Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used.”  From the Christian perspective, the tendency (which is also a temptation) of modern men to idolize power for its own sake and to elevate man to Master of the Universe is more dangerous still.  This particular theme merits an encyclical of its own.

Laudato Si’ has three principal subjects: man’s responsibility for the natural world entrusted to him by God, the evils of capitalism, and the solidarity of the human race.  The first of these is basic Christian knowledge.  The second, however, is actually a misnomer for “industrialism,” and the third a modern secular substitute for the scriptural concept of neighborliness.

Francis’s conflation of capitalism and industrialism has been shared by 90 percent or more of capitalism’s critics as far back as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at the start of the 19th century.  The truth is that Karl Marx—though he did indeed view capitalist economics as the primary evil of his time—probably would never have written Das Kapital had not capitalism, relatively benign of itself, produced the industrial system that subsequently destroyed traditional society and damaged the natural world on a massive scale.  As for solidarity, it is a purely political concept inspired by the communist vision of the international proletarian revolution.  Solidarity has absolutely nothing to do with Christian charity toward one’s neighbor; instead, it substitutes for practical human concern and generosity an abstract, ideological, and unrealizable agendum.

Laudato Si’ is frankly unworthy of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.  It is a liberal blueprint for international social, economic, and political reform on behalf of halting global warming and rescuing the world’s poor that fails to reflect the Church’s repository of human wisdom amassed over two millennia; an intellectually insipid document written in scientistic and bureaucratic language by men (cloistered by liberalism, not their vocations) who appear to have no understanding of how the modern industrial world actually works.  Further, as R.R. Reno notes in First Things, the encyclical’s prescriptions endorse the same technocratic approach to reversing environmental degradation that the powercrats who did the damage in the first place adopted.  Laudato Si’ reads as if it had been handed down from the United Nations Building in New York, not the Vatican in Rome.  Were the prescriptions of this encyclical to be widely followed, there would be scarcely any separation at all between Church and World State.