Increasing extreme weather conditions like record-high temperatures and devastating droughts are undoubtedly the result of “unchecked human intervention on nature,” Pope Francis declared in a letter published today expanding on his 2015 Laudato Si’ encyclical.

Since that publication, he said, “I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”

Pope Francis called out the United States, specifically, in this new apostolic exhortation, titled Laudate Deum, issued on the first day of the Synod on Synodality.

“If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact,” he said. 

“The ethical decadence of real power is disguised thanks to marketing and false information, useful tools in the hands of those with greater resources to employ them to shape public opinion,” he wrote.

Pope Francis’s Specificity Is ‘Not Accidental’

Christiana Zenner, an associate professor of theology, science, and ethics at Fordham, said, “This is a document that doubles down morally on the centrality of climate crises and the immediate responsibility of ‘all people of good will’ to address them.” 

“Pope Francis first dismantles climate denialism by careful arguments, data, precision of terms, and strategic citation of the climate-recidivistic U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,” Zenner said. “And the penultimate paragraph of the exhortation likewise identifies the ways that U.S.-based climate exceptionalism is problematic. This is as specific about national responsibilities as a pope ever gets, and it is definitely not accidental here.”

The publication coincides with the upcoming U.N. climate change conference that will convene in Dubai in November, much like the release of the 2015 encyclical ahead of the Paris climate conference. The pontiff laments that the Paris Agreement has been poorly implemented, lacking effective tools to force compliance. 

“International negotiations cannot make significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their national interests above the global common good,” he wrote.

Never Mind the Bedroom, ‘the Entire House Will Burn Down’

David Gibson, director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, said the new publication shifts the controversy among American Catholics from sex to climate change—which has the potential to be even more contentious. 

“The focus and controversy in the church that Pope Francis leads has lately been directed toward issues of sex and sexuality and his efforts to make Catholicism more inclusive. The irony is that this papal exhortation will likely be even more controversial for Americans than any issue of sexuality because it demands fundamental changes in our consumerist lifestyles.”

Gibson added, “Many American Catholics want the church to focus on what people do in the bedroom. Pope Francis is saying the entire house will burn down if we don’t change our behavior in every other aspect of our lives.”

In “Ecowomanism, Justice, and the Work of Planetary and Self Care,” Harris, a professor at Wake Forest University, made the case that race, gender, spirituality, and ecology are deeply intertwined and talked about the role of Black women in environmental justice.

“Ecowomanism is essentially an approach to environmental ethics that centers the voices, perspectives, expertise, and scholarship of women of African descent,” she said.

“All over the world, there are women of color who are at the forefront of environmental justice work because it’s our children who are being deeply impacted.”

The starting point for Harris’ conversation with Christiana Zenner, Ph.D., associate professor of theology at Fordham, was “Whose Earth is it Anyway?”(University of North Carolina Press, 2000), a groundbreaking essay by James Cone, Ph.D., who is widely credited as the father of Black liberation theology.

The premise of the essay is that the same logic that leads to slavery and segregation also leads to the exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature.

“In the same way that James Cone argues that there is a link between justice issues and environmental issues, there is also a deep, deep link between all justice issues and earth justice issues,” Harris said.

All undergraduate Fordham students taking the core curriculum class Faith and Critical Reason this semester have read the essay. Many were present for the event at Keating Hall, which was sponsored by the Department of Theology and is part of the undergraduate First Year Experience program. It was also live-streamed to the Lincoln Center campus.

Harris, who was a student of Cone at the Union Theological Seminary, said that Cone did more than just connect racial justice to environmental justice. Equally important, he credited the indigenous and Black women who came before him for their contributions to the field.

“Dismantling patriarchy is very difficult for men to do in our culture and the African-American community. So it is quite significant that Cone was actually able to get there, and he was able to get there in the midst of his career,” she said.

Harris said that some of her fellow students at Union Theological Seminary, including Jacqueline Grant, Ph.D., and Karen Baker-Fletcher, Ph.D., were instrumental in pushing Cone to make space for Black women.

“That they created a space for his own awakening is one of the most compassionate things that womanists can do,” she said.

“In Buddhism, we call that concept ‘fierce compassion.’ It’s loving someone so much that you hold them accountable to the spirit who they ought to truly be.”

Harris also talked at length about how interfaith dialogue can strengthen the ways one talks about ecological and racial justice.

“The way we talk about climate change today is not how you’re going to be talking about it 20 years from now. You’re going to need new language. Some of it will come from the poetry you write, some of it will come from the articles you’ve written, and some of it will come from the inspiration that you get here tonight,” she said.

Rhea Sidbatte, a first-year student at the Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center majoring in Global Finance and Business Economics, watched the live stream from the Lincoln Center campus.

Sidbatte never took philosophy or theology in high school, and Faith and Critical Reason has become one of her favorite classes, she said, because it’s given her the tools to see how theology is relevant to her day-to-day life. She said she was inspired by Harris’ focus on the value of communalism and lived experience.

“When we’re talking about these ecological issues, we have to move the conversation from focusing on doctrines to listening to other people’s stories and hearing where they came from,” she said.

Harris also met with students and faculty of color in a private reception after the conversation. In addition to her appearance on the 26th, Harris also visited the Rose Hill campus on April 27 for a conversation with the Fordham community about DEI frameworks and anti-racist pedagogies and for a gathering where students, faculty, and community members reflected on Fordham’s newly-released Laudato Si’ Action Plan and brainstormed about next steps.

In a joint lecture to approximately 25 students, faculty, and staff on March 7 at the Lincoln Center campus, Christiana Zenner, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, and Leslie Timoney, associate director of campus operations at the Lincoln Center campus, illustrated why there is much more to water than just H2O.

An Engineering Feat

Timoney, who spearheads the Lincoln Center campus efforts to meet the city of New York’s Water Challenge, explained how the city first began collecting water in a reservoir at what is now Bryant Park, and then, as the city grew, began expanding its water system into the Catskill Mountains region. The current system consists of a series of aqueducts, reservoirs, and tunnels that funnel drinking water from the Croton, Catskill, and Delaware watersheds toward the city, with one last stop in Mount Pleasant, where it runs through a facility that uses ultraviolet light to disinfect it.

“Amazingly enough, [the system is]125 miles long, and water gets to the city 95% by gravity. We’re only pumping 5%. It’s just an amazing engineering feat,” she said, noting that most cities spend three to four times more than New York because of pumping costs.

“So this is just a unique situation, and we’re lucky to have it.”

What also makes the water system unique, she said, is the fact that the New York state controls the watershed where New York City gets its water. When New York first began tapping water from the Delaware watershed, west of the Catskills, the state of New Jersey sued to stop it, because the water flowed into the river that divides New Jersey from Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court actually settled the dispute in a 1954 case that dictated how much water each state could claim.

The average New Yorker uses 120 gallons of that water a day, she said. Personal use, such as drinking, cooking, showering, and cleaning, accounts for 60 gallons a day, while the other 60 gallons is used for services, such as street cleaning and restaurant supplies. To help preserve that watershed, Timoney said Fordham has taken actions such as using new washing machines on campus that use significantly less water.

Water As a Right-To-Life Issue

Zenner, the author of Just Water: Water, Ethics, and Fresh Water Crises (Orbis, 2018), said she appreciated the nitty gritty details of Timoney’s presentation, such as the fact that the 14 water treatment plants that treat sewage are connected to both the city’s sewers and its storm drains. The latter fact should give us pause about letting dog waste, litter, or lawn chemicals end up in the gutter, and also get people thinking about the entire water cycle.

“When I give talks, one of the challenges that I often give is, ‘Let’s learn about your water supply. Let’s learn about how the fresh water is sourced, and how it’s treated, and how it interacts or doesn’t intact with other forms of treated water,’” she said.

She said the philosopher Ivan Illich had it right when he declared ‘I shall not reduce all waters to H2O.’

“One of the tricky things in speaking with water policy folks, and why we sometimes look at each other across the table like aliens when we have conversations, is that, for many water policy folks in the late 20th and now 21st century, their presumption has been that water is H2O, and it is an entity that is amenable to various forms of technological, engineering, and economic control,” she said.

“It has been treated as resource and a commodity, but it is also more than that.”

In fact, she said, the current global freshwater crisis has spurred many religious groups to turn to their traditions to ask whether they provide moral reasoning that can inform thinking about water as a justice issue, or as a sacred substance.

The Catholic Church addressed it most recently in 2015, when Pope Francis issued the encyclical Laudato Si’ but Zenner said the church had in fact been quietly but consistently raising access to clean, fresh water as an issue since 2000. Water, she said, is a locus for thinking about “the interaction of social and ecological justice, and the imperative of protecting the environment and providing livelihoods to the poor.”

“Fresh water is seen by the Vatican as a matter of dignity, justice, and respect for life. In fact, this language of water as a right to life issue can be found in a good number of Catholic documents. I stress that because particularly in a Catholic church in the United States, that is a not a standard association of right to life language. If I say right to life, you will likely say abortion, birth control, maybe euthanasia or the death penalty, but not necessarily access to clean, fresh water,” she said.

“So that’s a really important moral expansion to note.”