ABSTRACT
Pope Francis’ second encyclical, issued two years into his papacy, is on ecology. Entitled Laudato Si, it begins by calling out the unbridled capitalism and irresponsible development that have led to environmental degradation, and ends by calling on the world to, in the words of the encyclical’s subtitle, focus “on care for our common home.” In the words of Pope Francis, this technocratic anthropocentrism is “a Promethean vision of mastery over the world”. It leads to practical relativism, making the value of things solely relative to their usefulness. Its dominance in all areas of life means that the ecological crisis is not a partial crisis, limited to specific dimensions of life or simply one crisis among others. The “bold cultural revolution” that Pope Francis speaks of, therefore, consists in liberating ourselves from atomistic, mechanical view of the world in favor of interconnected view of the world where all things are interdependent in a universal communion of all things in God.
