‘Laudate Deum’: A brief guide for busy readers
The world is not moving fast enough to mitigate the devastating effects of climate change, Pope Francis said Wednesday.
Writing in his new apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum (“Praise God”), released on the Oct. 4 feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the pope said the planet was approaching a “point of no return” as global warming hurtled toward the maximum recommended limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) higher than the pre-industrial average.
“Even if we do not reach this point of no return, it is certain that the consequences would be disastrous and precipitous measures would have to be taken, at enormous cost and with grave and intolerable economic and social effects,” he wrote.
“Although the measures that we can take now are costly, the cost will be all the more burdensome the longer we wait.”
While that is the text’s headline message, the document — a sequel to Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ — contains much else besides. Here’s a brief guide for busy readers.
It’s short
The first thing to note is that Laudate Deum is strikingly short for a document in the Pope Francis era.
The exhortation clocks in at around 8,000 words, compared to the 40,000 words of Laudato si’ and the 60,000 words of the gargantuan 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. It can be read comfortably in half an hour.
Why ‘Praise God’?
The document’s opening words — or “incipit” in Latin — relate to St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology.
“‘Praise God for all his creatures,’” Laudate Deum begins. “This was the message that St. Francis of Assisi proclaimed by his life, his canticles and all his actions.”
Unlike Laudato si’, which began with a direct quotation from St. Francis’ “Canticle of the Creatures,” Laudate Deum appears to start with a paraphrase seeking to capture the spirit of the saint’s work.
