ABSTRACT
Pope Francis has a different ideological-political profile. Pope Francis is open to modern historicism, its utopian ideal of a this-worldly universality which includes man and nature, and which takes as its anthropological, ecclesiological and social-ethical foundation the experience of relation. This entails a break with modernity's individualism and "prideful" anthropocentrism, but not a break with modernity's monism, fundamental for a democracy immune against critic based on transcendent truths and norms. Both of his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI had faced the cultural challenges of late modernity. The pope's ecology is in many ways a fruitful and creative impulse in the current efforts to solve the climatic threat. But it is the relation between the person and natural life that is most important to the pope. It appears that the metaphysical natural law perspective on man's relationship to nature which ought to be foundational has been withdrawn in favor of a relational perspective.
