The current election campaign has highlighted tension between increasing individual wealth and the needs of the disadvantaged and between social action by government or through the privatization of services.
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| The common good |
Katherine Scott of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, an independent, non-partisan research institute concerned with issues of social, economic and environmental justice, has produced a federal election primer looking at investing in public services. Scott reports that much of the current debate is narrowly focused on individual gain.
What proponents aren’t saying is that these strategies are just another form of privatization—leaving families to cope on their own with illness, job losses and caring responsibilities—all at huge personal expense. (An OECD report estimates that poor families would have to spend three-quarters of their income on essential services if they had to purchase them directly).
What we do need is a more equitable and sustainable way of meeting our common needs and tackling the pressing threats of poverty, precarity and climate warming together.1
Cristina Richie, an adjunct professor of Health Care Ethics at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS) University in Boston, MA., writes that to be sure, the flagging interest from secular media is not too surprising: the Pope didn’t present the world with groundbreaking scientific claims supporting anthropogenic climate change, nor did he unveil a large-scale policy to reach sustainable energy by 2050. Rather, the most influential Catholic–the Bishop of Rome–the leader of the largest denomination in the world, issued a statement at the highest level of authoritative teaching, on one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century, urging the participation of all in pursuit of the common good. And this, I believe, will be the lasting legacy and primary contribution of the encyclical “Laudato Si”.
The notion of the common good is clearly taught in paragraph 93, where the Pope writes, “the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone.” Attention to the whole person within a society is foundational for the functioning of the common good, that is, individual flourishing, but in service to the group. The common good is disrupted when one cannot participate in society due to lack of opportunity, education or ability, or when others dominate society with self-centered interest; both are currently at play in ecological politics, and therefore Francis implores us to think of “one world with a common plan” (#164, emphasis in original).2
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| Common good |
Austen Ivereigh, a Fellow of Contemporary Church History at Campion Hall, Oxford, relates a recent encounter of Pope Francis with Greta Thunberg.
On April 16, 2019, Francis met a pigtailed Swedish teenager with Asperger Syndrome in St. Peter’s Square. The sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg, inspiration of climate protest strikes across the world, had become the conscience of a new generation demanding from adults that they act. The old pope was beaming, and had just one message to her: “Go on, go on, continue,” he told her. Thunberg was overjoyed. “Thank you for standing up for the climate, for speaking the truth,” she told him. “It means a lot.”3
According to Pablo Canziani, an Argentine atmospheric physicist who studies climate change, Francis’s genius was to discern the moment when science and religion were reaching out to each other, ready for a partnership that could enable new ways of seeing among the mass of citizens of the world, and so halt the hurtling train of consumption and destruction.
That new lens starts with the anguished realization that something vital has been lost and leads to a conviction that things have to be done differently to get it back. The old-fashioned word for this is “conversion.”3
In Episode 13 of his video series “Understanding Laudato Si” Fr. Daniel P. Horan, OFM explores the theme of Ecological Conversion.
The moral aspect of care for the planet and care for the poor is one that is worthy of consideration by Canadians as they prepare to vote.
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