A Journal for The Contemporary Church

New and Back Issues

Heart, Hands and Voice – living out Laudato Si’

2.00

Laudato Si’, for me and probably thousands of others, is the tangible delivery of that moment’s promise. It is of course an invaluable addition to the corpus of Catholic social teaching, but it is also much more than that. It is, I believe, one of the most important, in the true sense prophetic, documents of our time, and it is for all of us. Pope Francis writes, quite deliberately that he ‘would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our
common homes’ (3) and it is in that spirit that all people are invited to answer. We won’t all agree with everything that the encyclical contains, with every aspect of the Pope’s analysis or with all the links he makes with traditional Catholic teaching. That’s okay. I don’t think he wrote this just as another chunk of the magisterium, a deposit of faith to be stored in the Vatican archives. No, this is a letter, a real letter to his sisters and brothers across the world, inviting us to listen and to speak, to read and to respond.