Paul Elie is a writer, editor, and journalist known for explorations of faith and culture. He is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Image via Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs

I imagine that the passing of Pope Francis and the election of a new pope has Paul Elie reflecting once again on Catholicism’s relevance in contemporary life. I’m reminded of an essay he wrote in 2019, where he explored the tension between traditional religious transcendence and the modern sense of transcendence many now find in nature. For a growing number of people, he observed, nature has become the primary source of awe and meaning, while Catholicism—and institutional religion more broadly—can feel increasingly distant.

He highlighted Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home as a pivotal document in the Church’s engagement with contemporary issues. The letter addresses climate change, environmental degradation, and our moral obligation to care for the planet. It urges Catholics—and all people of goodwill—to treat Earth as a shared home, linking spiritual and ecological responsibility. Elie noted the paradox: just as the Church turns outward to address urgent global concerns, its worldview can seem more foreign than ever to many.

""Laudato si’ is a text of the present moment. Just when the state of the Earth—drastically altered by human-induced change to land, sea, air, water, and climate—seems to have reached a moment of no return, Francis’s text invites Catholics and people of goodwill to redress the situation, both by changing our way of life and by recovering a view of humanity as one family, and Earth as “our common home,” deserving of our care.""

""In one sense, Catholicism and the natural world are in the same predicament: vast, omnipresent, bafflingly complex; despoiled by overuse and neglect alike; in need of changes so profound and long-term in undertaking that short-term change often seems beside the point.

""In another sense, for many Catholics, I suspect, Catholicism and the natural world have traded places. Now, for many of us, the natural world is the source of transcendence. Not the only one, but the default one—the “natural” one. The natural world is our connection to the past and to the other than human. It is the measure of time and the ground bass of our knowledge of cosmic beginnings and last things. It is the basis for lives of know-how and human responsibility, and the source of something like wisdom.""

ESSAY: Ecological Conversion