By Joseph Bonasia
While the United States federal government is doing its best to undermine clean, renewable energies, Pope Leo is leading and teaching through example. He just established a foundation to oversee a solar plant that will make the Vatican the world’s first carbon-neutral state.
In this project, which will also preserve the agricultural use of and minimize environmental impact to the land it will be built on, we see the crucial role technology can play in protecting the planet upon which we all depend.
This announcement comes just weeks after the publication of “Magnifica Humanitas, on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” in which Pope Leo focuses on the health of the Earth and its ecosystems more than people might at first expect or have gleaned from commentaries.
He calls attention to the environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI) through the enormous amounts of water, energy and energy-infrastructure that data centers require, and their significant influence on carbon emissions. It is essential, he writes, to develop more sustainable technological solutions to reduce these environmental harms.
But he goes deeper than this.
In an encyclical ultimately about “the pressing duty to remain profoundly human” in an increasingly technological world, the pope reinforces the Christian belief that human life revolves around three fundamental relationships — with God, with our fellow humans and with the natural world.
He references Creation, our common home and environmental crisis and protection over 20 times.
“Created for relationship,” he writes, “every human person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion with him, with others, and with Creation,” and “the Church regards all who sincerely seek ‘truth, goodness and beauty’ as companions … in defending the dignity of every person and in caring for creation.”
Morally and spiritually, the well-being of every person and the well-being of Creation are inextricably linked. Leo notes that Pope Francis, in his landmark encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” demonstrated that the environment is not an issue independent of human society, and that Francis’ proposal for an “integral ecology” combined care for our common home and our fellow humans. The cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor cannot be separated.
Integral ecology, Leo states, has become an “indispensable dimension” of the Social Doctrine of the Church, and his attention to the health of the planet in an encyclical about AI is testimony to this fact.
Pope Leo digs down to root causes of our current socio-economic and environmental crises. He criticizes a technocratic paradigm that dominates economic and political life and which “reduces creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever more efficiency.” (A recent essay about factory farming, “What the Cult of Efficiency Costs Us,” is a concrete example.)
He asks crucial questions: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”
And he sets parameters. “The creative intelligence of humanity,” he writes, “is a gift that can alleviate suffering and open up new possibilities, but it must remain ordered toward the common good, justice, the care of the vulnerable, and creation.”
On June 10, the 100th birthday of its architect, Antoni Gaudi, Pope Leo was in Barcelona to bless the Basilica Sagrada Familia, the tallest church in the world and an architectural and technological marvel. Its towering treelike columns reach skyward supporting a ceiling whose constantly changing light looks like sunlight filtering through a forest canopy.
“Nature,” said Gaudi, often called God’s architect, “is my teacher,” and the Basilica Sagrada Familia is his homage to God and nature. It teaches and inspires people through architecture (an architecture that incorporated concepts of sustainability before sustainability became a pressing concern).
Pope Leo called the basilica a masterpiece and an “eloquent catechesis made of stones, color and light.”
In it we see the gift of creative intelligence in service to those vital relationships with God, our fellow humans and the natural world that Pope Leo emphasizes are fundamental to a distinctly human life.
Joseph Bonasia is a founding board member of the SWFL RESET Center. Banner photo: The exterior of the Basilica Sagrada Familia (iStock image).
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