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.”

At this year’s Fordham Women’s Summit, to be held Wednesday, Oct. 18, at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan, four alumni in the fashion industry will share how companies are looking to implement innovative practices to curb their environmental impact.

Barbara Porco, Ph.D., professor of accounting and head of Fordham’s Responsible Business Center, will moderate the panel, which will feature the following Fordham graduates:

• Stacey Ferrara, GABELLI ’10, director of strategic initiatives and operations at the Estée Lauder Companies
• Claudia Rondinelli, FCLC ’91, head of global materials: leather and trims at Ralph Lauren
• Georgeanne Siller, GABELLI ’17, assistant buyer, women’s apparel at Macy’s Inc.

Beyond Fashion: Sustainability Across Industries

This year’s women’s summit—“Beyond Green: Investing in a More Sustainable World”—is inspired in part by the University’s environmental action plan and aims to highlight how Fordham women are helping to lead charge across many industries. Speakers will share ideas for how everyone can take bold action in their own lives to live more sustainably.

Jeannette Ferran Astorga, GABELLI ’96, executive vice president of corporate affairs, communications, and sustainability at Zoetis Inc., will deliver the keynote address. She’ll share how her values-driven career started at Fordham and has led her to Zoetis, a global animal health company. In addition to setting long-range environmental and social impact goals for the company, she started the Zoetis Foundation, which aims to advance opportunities for veterinarians and farmers, including those in sub-Saharan Africa.

The day will also feature a conversation on how the food, wine, and other products we consume affect us, and how we can become better consumers for our own benefit and the health of the planet. Other sessions include a look into environmental research happening at Fordham and a discussion of the ways Fordham is taking action to support our common home and inspire change in its communities.

Learn more about the Women’s Summit and register at fordham.edu/womenssummit.

Fordham marked the launch of a seven-year transformative climate change plan with an April 19 event at the Rose Hill campus that brought students, activists, government officials, and neighborhood leaders together on the Rose Hill campus.

The University also welcomed back to campus Elizabeth Yeampierre, FCRH ‘80, who laid out the challenges of achieving climate justice in a keynote address

“In the climate justice movement where I come from, we say that transition is inevitable, but justice is not,” she said.

Yeampierre, an attorney who co-chairs the national Climate Justice Alliance and is the executive director of the Brooklyn-based Latino community organization UPROSE, challenged institutions such as Fordham to shake off conventional thinking.

“Climate change is not conventional. It is unpredictable, it is violent, and it is here,” she said.

“We really need people who are thinking in a way that is unconventional and honors Mother Earth, and are building just relationships and are engaged in self-transformation, so that we are able to hold this work, which is literally the human rights of our day.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with Julie Gafney, Ph.D., director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), on the terrace of the Walsh Family Library, Yeampierre laid out a case for a bottom-up strategy for dealing with climate change.

“We need to be able to listen to the people on the ground. The educated person knows how to take the formal education that they have, break it down, and make it accessible so that people on the ground can run with it,” she said.

As an example, she pointed to an app that UPROSE created for the 90 auto salvage yards in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to use to access best practices for becoming climate adaptable. It includes information on chemicals that are vulnerable to extreme heat, which is expected to become a bigger problem in the future.

“Environmentalists would like to shut them down, but these are working-class people in our community, and we don’t throw away our people,” she said.

Ryan Chen, a junior environmental science major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and a student advocacy fellow, was one of a dozen members of the audience who engaged with Yeampierre in a Q&A session. He plans to apply the lessons from her talk to his work with Sunrise Movement NYC.

“Sunrise NYC is developing local campaigns to fight for a new green deal that also addresses the needs of people in New York City,” he said.

“What Elizabeth told me is, it’s more important to support the work of other organizations that are already doing. That’s something that I really want to bring to the conversation, to make sure that we don’t co-opt other people’s work.”

The theme of grassroots organization suffused the day’s event, which was organized by CCEL. Tents arrayed on the lawn in front of the library featured representatives from groups such as the Bronx River Alliance, Cafeteria Culture, and Friends of Pelham Bay Park, and speakers included representatives from Loving the Bronx and the New York City Parks.

A panel discussion, “Global Migration, Climate Displacement, and Racial Justice,” featured Annetta Seecharran, GSAS ’94, executive director of Chhaya CDC, an advocacy group that serves South Asian and Indo-Carribbean communities, and Andrew Rasmussen, Ph.D., professor of psychology and head of the Culture, Migration, and Community Research Group at Fordham.

Seecharran, a graduate of Fordham’s International Political and Economic Development (IPED) program, noted that her organization’s clients don’t often bring up climate change as a concern, but they do bring up health and housing problems that are exacerbated by it.

Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive flooding in New York City in 2021, and killed 11 people trapped in basement apartments, was a wake-up call that housing and weather issues can collide, even inland.

“My organization is known for working on tenant and homeowner issues. We’re not known as an environmental organization, but we can’t think of our work as separate from the environmental,” she said.

Rasmussen said community organizations need to organize and document environmental issues that are displacing them, and demand help from local officials.

“Those of you who know your Frederick Douglass remember that power concedes nothing without demand. It never has, it never will. Community organizations are the key to making those demands.”

In his presentation to a standing room only crowd in the McNally Amphitheatre, A Moral Economy: Faith and the Free Market in an Age of Inequality, sponsored by the Center on Religion and Culture (CRC), Cardinal Tobin offered a vociferous defense of the Catholic Church’s stance on the modern global economy. The current economic order has produced unprecedented levels of income inequality, he said, and echoing Pope Francis, he noted that “people who feel abandoned will unravel solidarity” among the human race.

A Long Tradition of Weighing in

While Pope Francis has raised hackles among free market apostles with his criticisms of capitalism, Cardinal Tobin noted that Pope Pius XI weighed in on the subject as far back as 1931, and Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI was even more forceful. Francis, while more tolerant of debate within the church than his predecessor, is equally adamant that the church has a role to play in world-wide affairs.

“More than his predecessors, Francis encourages reflection, even debate among his doctrine. He does not invoke infallibility to support his conclusions regarding social phenomenon, but he does insist that the Christian life has a soulful dimension, and rejects any attempt to reduce the response of faith to an individualistic morality,” he said.

“As a good pastor, he claims the responsibility of speaking on social morality for the good of all.”

The starting point for change, Tobin said, is at the “existential peripheries of life.”

“If you look at the injustice in the gospels, it’s not that people are overtly and programmatically oppressing the poor. They just don’t see them. That’s the point of Matthew 25. That’s the point of Luke’s story of the rich man and Lazarus,” he said.

“What does inequality really mean? A clear and humble view of it will tell us it’s people we don’t see at all, and people whom we don’t see for whom they are.”

The problem, he said, is the CEOs who embrace the idea that the day that a corporation thinks more about the good of society than it does its bottom line is the day that corporation goes out of business.

“Francis says ‘No, a just economy must be concerned with the common good,’” Cardinal Tobin said.

Both Cardinal Tobin and CRC director David Gibson acknowledged at the start of the event that it was awkward to focus on another subject in light of the sex abuse crisis that again engulfed the church this summer. The sex abuse crisis, he said, is “the bitter fruit of a toxic culture,” and Catholics have a right to be angry about it. But he said it shouldn’t result in shutting down discussions of Catholic social justice teaching.

History of the Anglo-Saxon Approach to Wealth

Jeffrey Sachs, Ph.D., director of Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development, delivered a response to the Cardinal’s lecture, and joined him afterword in a discussion moderated by Washington Post columnist Christine Emba.

Sachs said that although few religious traditions had directed as much intellectual firepower toward issues such as climate change and economics as the Catholic Church, its message is greeted with great skepticism in the United States. That’s because we subscribe to an Anglo-Saxon perspective on wealth that suggests that tapping into an individual’s inherent greed and is a good thing. We have Bernard Mandeville’s 1714 poem “The Fable of the Bees,” to thank in part, he said.

“He wrote a poem that said the bees have created this great hive by all of their vices being allowed to be free. This was the paradox: That by unleashing greed, which the sages had said forever should be keep under control, you would create dynamism and greatness. You would create, as Mandeville said, the “envy of all the other hives.”

Sachs said Adam Smith then took the idea, and in his 1776 treatise, The Wealth of Nations, dubbed it “the invisible hand” of the market. By pursuing their own goals, Smith posited, individuals created the collective wealth of the nation. Over time, Sachs said, this has morphed into a twisted, amoral celebration of greed, epitomized by the writings of Ayn Rand.

“So about 2,000 years of good thought that greed really isn’t good for the soul, and isn’t necessarily good for the community or what Aristotle called your eudaemonia, basically went out the window,” he said.

“In my field, we created the weirdest anthropology that said people are selfish and greedy,” said Sachs, who is a noted economist. “But that’s OK, because the invisible hand will create a prosperous society. We teach that in bad economics courses. I know, I took one.”

In his encyclical Laudato Si, Sachs said, Pope Francis connected unrestrained greed to what scientists call the Anthropocene, a period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment, with dire consequences.

“What Pope Francis is telling us is, we have to get the greed under control if we’re going to survive. It is blinding us to the dangers. Why is the U.S. pulling out of the Paris climate agreement? The simple line is, the president is a nincompoop, an ignorant, nasty person,” he said.

“But it’s the greed that’s doing it. It is the inability of a CEO of an oil company to say, I shouldn’t destroy the planet; I’ve got a bottom line to meet,” said Sachs. What Pope Francis is saying is, ‘No, that’s not right. The property rights, the profit, the greed motive cannot be what determines our fate; we will destroy ourselves that way.”

For Guy Consolmagno, S.J., it has been both, perhaps in equal doses. In a talk on the Fordham campus on Feb. 26, Brother Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican Observatory, said that religion and science enjoy a long partnership in humans’ endeavor to understand the world in which they live.

“Studying science is an act of worship,” said Brother Consolmagno, a graduate of MIT, former Peace Corps volunteer, author, and research astronomer. “You have to have faith in the questions you are asking.”

Delivering the John C. and Jeanette D. Walton Lecture in Science, Philosophy, and Religion, Brother Consolmagno drew parallels between an unlikely pair: Galileo, a Renaissance man who created the telescope and changed science forever, and Pope Francis, whose concern for climate change’s effects on the world’s poor is aimed at reinvigorating the Catholic mission.

“Galileo Would Have Been On The Colbert Show”

Had he been born in the 20^th century rather than the 16^th, Galileo would have been world-renown, “a media star … just like Carl Sagan,” said Brother Consolmagno. “[He] would have been on The Colbert Show, the Tonight Show.” Although Galileo’s notoriety landed him in some trouble with the church in his day, said Brother Consolmagno, his important scientific discoveries set in motion a revolution on how scientists make assumptions about the universe. It moved science from the Golden Age of celebrating book knowledge of the past, to the scientific revolution of seeking knowledge for the future.

“Galileo was special because he had the telescope and was able to see and understand what he was seeing . . . the moon’s craters . . . the Orion Nebula,” said Brother Consolmagno. “And he was seeing things that were not in any book.”

“He understood why it mattered, and he knew it was important to tell the world.”

Laudato Si’: What Pope Francis Sees

Brother Consolmagno called the pope’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, an entreaty that doesn’t settle scientific questions but draws on today’s scientific research to conclude “the environment is reaching a breaking point that will cause a change in humanity that cannot be fixed by technology.” Francis says these ecological problems are symptoms of much deeper social justice issues, “symptoms that come out of personal sins” and our detachment from God.

“The pope is [offering]new assumptions, just as Galileo saw a new set of assumptions in how the universe works,” he said.

The pope’s call to action, said Brother Consolmagno, is for human beings to develop a new set of ethics, “a new idea of what is wrong” in the human relationship to nature and human ecology. Nature, like the human, is a creation of God; therefore it is mankind’s to care for like a sibling, not to own.

Nor are humans gods who can fix ecological degradation through technology, he said. Technology advances over time, but human ethics tend to waver: a technologically-advanced society may not necessarily solve the earth’s problems.

“Ask yourself who had better ethics: Nazi Germany? Or Socrates?”

By calling for a change in our humanity, the pope’s encyclical does much to demonstrate why science needs faith, said Brother Consolmagno.

“How do we know what change will be for the better? Ultimately, the Jesuit answer is, if it brings us—human beings who will never be God—closer to God.”

The discussion, which was held at the New York Ethical Culture Society, was led by Christiana Peppard, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology, science, and ethics, and Steven Stoll, Ph.D, professor of history. Students were required to read the encyclical over the summer, and share their thoughts on a university blog.

Peppard prefaced remarks on the document by noting its historical significance. Although the Catholic Church has long addressed environmental concerns, this was the first encyclical in which ecology is central, she said. According to the pope, ecology is a triad of important relationships: among human beings themselves, between human beings and God, and between humans and the planet that sustains them.

“There’s never been an encyclical that talks about these three sets of relationships as central to Catholic social teaching, even though Pope Francis draws so much on the established tradition of Catholic social teaching, and quite frankly, that’s exciting,” Peppard said.

She said that the FCLC students were animated by the issues of modern anthropocentrism, ecological debt, the technocratic paradigm, and the commodification of water, according to postings on the blog.

The encyclical genuinely aspires to address every person on the planet, regardless of their faith, she said.

“You don’t have to be Catholic . . . to read, think about, and reflect critically and constructively upon what Laudato Sí might be saying,” she said.

Peppard and Stoll opened up the floor to the students, who addressed the room through two microphones.

One student from Hong Kong bemoaned the fact that a vista that her parents could once see clearly had become choked with smog by the time she grew up. A student from Brooklyn cautioned against assumptions that the planet needs help from humans for its own survival, pointing out that the earth has thus far survived many species.

Students who self-identified as conservatives expressed hope that the church’s reframing of environmental issues would help them to bridge the partisan divide in this country. A student who hailed from Berkley, California, lamented that Laudato Sí contained few concrete proposals.

Stoll noted how Pope Francis explores the way we make things, and challenges us to think of the earth as a single human community instead of a set of nation states, commodities, or exchanges. If we did, he said, we’d reject the capitalistic notion that everything, including water, needs to be commoditized. This goes for the skies too.

“The atmosphere is not a commodity, and has not been commodified as such, but loading it with methane and carbon dioxide claims it as a necessary attribute to manufacturing,” Stoll said.

“Francis calls the atmosphere a ‘common good,’ giving no industry or corporation the right to reduce its capacity to sustain human life.”

Although the Pope’s Laudato Sí has attracted criticism from free-market advocates, Stoll said they miss the larger, more profound point that Francis makes of thinking as the world as one interconnected system; although sooty skies and urban abandonment have been vanquished in New York City, they are still very much issues in other places.

“The only truly outrageous notion we have about the world is that the present condition will continue indefinitely, that things will stay exactly the same. Imagining . . . a wider sense of well-being, and decoupling the earth from its commodity value, is an entirely new (view),” he said.

“Climate change is real, it’s serious, and it’s worsening,” said Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia.

“There is no real scientific debate . . . The facts are rigorously established and the risks are absolutely understood—but we have confabulated a political debate in this country. This is a reflection of our money politics beyond anything else, [including]the oil, coal, and gas industries,” he said.

“But that chokehold is coming unstuck. The public doesn’t want to be owned. And they know something’s not right.”

Sachs and Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, SDB, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, were panelists for “Our Planet’s Keeper? The Environment, the Poor, and the Struggle for Justice,” an event sponsored by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture on Nov. 3.

In a discussion moderated by Joan Rosenhauer, executive vice president for Catholic Relief Services, both Sachs and Cardinal Rodríguez praised Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, which recognizes global warming and addresses environmental degradation.

The pope consulted more than 200 experts on these topics, yet Laudato Si has been met with strong criticism, said Cardinal Rodríguez. Some critics decry the encyclical and its condemnation of consumerism; others argue that the pope should refrain from political matters altogether.

“This is wrong,” said Cardinal Rodríguez. “The encyclical talks about global warming in passing. Its main argument is that the earth is our common home. And every house needs maintenance—especially when we live in a house that is a little old.”

Our house, the cardinal said, is in dire need of repair. “California—rationing water. In Texas, there is terrible flooding. And here in the Northeast, look at this autumn—or rather, what a beautiful summer we’re having!”

Now more than ever the world needs the church’s moral leadership, said Sachs. As for whether a pontiff’s words could change the world, he offered a historical example:

In the spring of 1963, at the height of the Cold War, an ailing Pope John XXIII vowed to devote the remainder of his papacy to establishing peace. The result was Pacem in Terris, an encyclical that urged governments to recognize their civic responsibility for the well-being of the world and to situate power relations within a moral framework.

Two months after the encyclical’s publication, President Kennedy gave the commencement address at American University. Drawing on the encyclical’s push for a geopolitical moral framework, the president called for Americans to reexamine their attitudes about peace. The starting point, he said, should be the recognition that we are all human beings.

“We all inhabit this small planet,” Sachs said, quoting Kennedy, “we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we’re all mortal.”

Upon hearing the “peace speech,” Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party, called the U.S. envoy to Moscow and said: “That was the finest speech by an American president since FDR. I want to make peace with this man.”

Six weeks later the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed, and five years later came the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation.

“Framing the situation in a moral way is what pulled us back from the brink,” Sachs said. “Not game theory calculations, not talk of mutual assured destruction, not a list of what the other side has to do and here’s the red line—it was saying that we have to examine our own attitudes, because the other side is also human and they will make the same judgment.

“The encyclical played a fundamental role in shifting the world. And here we are today. It’s happening again.”