ROME — The Vatican has announced a special “anniversary year” to commemorate Pope Francis’s “prophetic” 2015 encyclical letter on the environment, Laudato Sì.
The pope’s “watershed” encyclical “called the world’s attention to the increasingly precarious state of our common home,” declares a press release Saturday from the Vatican’s department of integral human development.
“Five years on the encyclical appears ever more relevant,” it states. “The multiple cracks in the planet that we inhabit, from the melting ice caps in the Arctic to the raging wildfires in the Amazon, from extreme weather patterns around the world to unprecedented levels of loss of biodiversity that sustain the very fabric of life, are too evident and detrimental to be ignored any more.”
The message of Laudato Sì is “just as prophetic today as it was in 2015,” the communiqué declares, especially as nations struggle to deal with the global coronavirus pandemic.
In the midst of the current crisis, the encyclical “can indeed provide the moral and spiritual compass for the journey to create a more caring, fraternal, peaceful and sustainable world,” it states, because we now have “a unique opportunity to transform the present groaning and travail into the birth pangs of a new way of living together, bonded together in love, compassion and solidarity, and a more harmonious relationship with the natural world, our common home.”
The pandemic has made clear how deeply we are all “interconnected and interdependent,” the message claims. “As we begin to envision a post-COVID world, we need above all an integral approach as “today’s problems call for a vision capable of taking into account every aspect of the global crisis.”
The Special Laudato Si Anniversary Year will run from May 24, 2020 – May 24, 2021, the Vatican announced, and will focus on bringing about an “ecological conversion.”
“The urgency of the situation calls for immediate, holistic and unified responses at all levels – local, regional, national and international,” it states. “We need, above all, a peoples’ movement from below, an alliance of all people of goodwill.”
Given the current ecological degradation, “we cannot remain indifferent any longer to the increasingly desperate cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” it concludes.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.