The Catholic Week for the Environment draws together movements that are not always seen as natural mates: the environmental movement and the Catholic Church. This week both are preaching the same message.
They share, too, the same challenge: to persuade people to take their message sufficiently seriously that they will demand and secure change. Both have a strong message about the crisis facing the world through global warming. The message, however, is not accepted urgently and broadly enough to lead to decisive action.
Churches have from their beginning struggled to communicate their message about salvation effectively to hearers weary of it. Their experience may also be pertinent to the challenges of addressing the environmental crisis. The approach of Pope Francis is of particular interest. He has insisted that the urgent need to care for the natural world of which we are part is not a disputed question but a Christian duty. He has appealed to the legacy of St Francis of Assisi, whose name he took when he became Pope. That link with a saint of the 13th century is worth pondering.
Francis of Assisi is popularly known best for his love of nature. It is embodied in early stories of his preaching to birds and winning over wild animals, and in the Canticle to the Sun in which delight in the beauty of the natural world is linked to his Christian faith.
His ecstatic wonder at the created world, however, was part of a broader and sharper-edged spiritual vision, expressed in his call to follow Jesus in a life of radical poverty. It led him to gather followers who shared his vision. They lived and travelled without possessions among ordinary people and so by their lifestyle commended the faith by which they lived. They spread their message primarily by a dedicated and radical communal life and only then through words.
Many Church authorities of the time saw Francis as no more than a romantic and potentially anarchic force. But Innocent III, the hard nut Pope of the time, saw in his movement possibilities of reaching the often disaffected rural poor whom the ordinary structures of the church failed to touch. The Gospel came alive when it was the Gospel for the poor and embodied in a way of living and acting.
Pope Francis has certainly embodied respect for the environment and respect for people who endure great poverty. He lives simply and reaches out to