The Presentation of the Impact of Caritas in veritate!
Presently and in the light of the two urgent challenges facing the human family and its home, the earth, namely, the ecological challenge of global warming and climate change and the socio-economic challenge of gaping inequalities in an economic and development systems that extol maximization of profit over the wellbeing of the person, one may describe two principal areas in which the Encyclical Letter, Caritas in veritate, has made a big impact. These are the areas of “ecology” and “integral human development.”
Firstly, Caritas in veritate and the evolution of the Concept of Integral Ecology:
Introduced first, as “natural ecology”, into the Church’s social teaching by St. Pope Paul VI (Populorum progressio), the concept of ecology was further applied to human life, as human ecology, and to the world of labour, as social ecology, in the magisterial teaching of St. Pope John Paul II. Pope Benedict XVI further deepened and broadened the application of the concept to the social life of the human family and to peace; wherefore one identifies now “an integral ecology” in the social teaching of the Church, as consisting of natural ecology, human ecology, social ecology and ecology of peace. Pope Benedict XVI dedicated an entire chapter (4) to the issue of the environment and human existence: “The Development of Peoples, Rights and Duties, The Environment,” because “the way humanity treats the environment influences the way it treats itself, and vice versa.”
There is, therefore, an inseparable relationship between human life and the natural environment which supports it as “that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we come and towards whom we are journeying”. This bond between man and his world paved the way for the very famous teaching of Pope Benedict XVI that the Book of Nature is one and indivisible, and that it includes not only the environment but also individuals, family, and social ethics. As he goes on to teach, “our duties towards the environment flow from our duties towards the person. Thus, the “decisive issue” in the relationship between man and his world: between natural and human ecology, “is the moral tenor of society”. Wherefore the redemption of man implies the redemption of creation which groans (Rom 8:22-24)
It is this final expansion of the concept of “ecology” by Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in veritate which prepares for references to an “integral ecology” and the inter-connectedness and the inter-relatedness of everything in the writings of Pope Francis. Vatican News Department
