Jubilee of the Poor

 The Jubilee event dedicated to the poor is to be celebrated from the evening of 14th November 2025, concluding on the World Day of the Poor on Sunday 16th November 2025. It is reported that, after his election to the See of St Peter, Pope Francis was prompted to take the name Francis after a remark from one of his fellow cardinals to the effect that he should not forget the poor. Similarly, Pope Leo XIV's first major document has been dedicated to the Catholic Church's particular mission towards the poor:

...  in continuity with the Encyclical Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis was preparing in the last months of his life an Apostolic Exhortation on the Church’s care for the poor, to which he gave the title Dilexi Te, as if Christ speaks those words to each of them, saying: “You have but little power,” yet “I have loved you” ( Rev 3:9). I am happy to make this document my own — adding some reflections — and to issue it at the beginning of my own pontificate, since I share the desire of my beloved predecessor that all Christians come to appreciate the close connection between Christ’s love and his summons to care for the poor. I too consider it essential to insist on this path to holiness, for “in this call to recognize him in the poor and the suffering, we see revealed the very heart of Christ, his deepest feelings and choices, which every saint seeks to imitate.” 

The person who is poor is likely to lack shelter, to be without access to clean water for drinking or for washing, to lack regular access to wholesome food, to lack clothing suitable to the weather, to have no habitation that they can call their own with any permanence, to lack the company of family or friends, to be disregarded by those who pass by; they might be anywhere in the world, not just in those places that are less developed than our own. The person who is poor lacks the material things that are the framework for a life lived with the dignity that is due to a human person; being poor, they lack the agency  that gives them the opportunity to choose a way in life. 

It is this lack of agency in their being poor that distinguishes their poverty from that of the life of the evangelical counsels. At first sight, the Church appears to contradict itself in advocating for poverty as one of the evangelical counsels freely chosen by those in religious life and working to alleviate poverty among those who do not have the agency to choose other than their poverty. Though the two poverties are quite different in nature from each other, there is a common ground for both of them. The life of the evangelical counsels represents a choice for a style of life lived in close imitation of that lived by Christ himself, and so is an attempt to identify a life with the life of Christ. Then, as Pope Leo XIV has pointed out, in a kind of reciprocity we are called to recognise Christ in those who are involuntarily poor and suffering.

There is a story of St Benedict Joseph Labre, who lived the last part of his life as a poor vagrant in the city of Rome in the 18th century, that captures the essential dignity that belongs to the person who is poor. On one occasion, he was picked out from the vagrants around the Spanish Steps to pose as a model by a painter. It took a bit of persuasion before St Benedict Joseph agreed, and he then posed for the figure of Christ, having at first shuddered at the prospect. Given the intinerant nature of his life, St Benedict Joseph (see here and here) is an appropriate figure to whom we can turn in a Jubilee Year.

Pope Francis expressed his wish that hope be granted to the poor in the Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee Year, citing his Encyclical Letter Laudato Si' n.49:

I ask with all my heart that hope be granted to the billions of the poor, who often lack the essentials of life. Before the constant tide of new forms of impoverishment, we can easily grow inured and resigned. Yet we must not close our eyes to the dramatic situations that we now encounter all around us, not only in certain parts of the world. Each day we meet people who are poor or impoverished; they may even be our next-door neighbours. Often they are homeless or lack sufficient food for the day. They suffer from exclusion and indifference on the part of many. It is scandalous that in a world possessed of immense resources, destined largely to producing weapons, the poor continue to be “the majority of the planet’s population, billions of people. These days they are mentioned in international political and economic discussions, but one often has the impression that their problems are brought up as an afterthought, a question which gets added almost out of duty or in a tangential way, if not treated merely as collateral damage. Indeed, when all is said and done, they frequently remain at the bottom of the pile”. Let us not forget: the poor are almost always the victims, not the ones to blame.

Jubilee 2025: Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation

 In the decree that promulgated the texts for the votive Mass for the Care of Creation, we find the following paragraph:

The mystery of creation is the beginning of salvation history, which culminates in Christ and from the mystery of Christ it receives definitive light; in fact, by manifesting His goodness, “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1,1) God already from these origins had in mind the glory of the new creation in Christ.

This Christological orientation is reflected in the texts themselves, which can be downloaded from the website of the Catholic Bishops Conference: Mass for Care of Creation. The Prayer after Communion reflects the theme of hope of the Jubilee Year:

May the sacrament of unity which we have received, O Father, increase communion with you and with our brothers and sisters, so that, as we await the new heaven and the new earth, we may learn to live in harmony with all creatures. 

 It is reflected in the choice of the New Testament reading from Colossians 1:15-20:

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were created through him and for him.

The Jubilee Prayer prompts a reading of St Paul's words in the Letter to the Romans:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

The "new creation in Christ" embraces both the new creation of men and women and the glory of the created world in which they live. As such, it needs to be distinguished from an environmentalism that does not take account of this full reality of our world and therefore becomes, to a greater or lesser extent, an ideology.

Integral Ecology and the Mass for the Care of Creation

Pope Francis' encyclical letter Laudato si' is entitled "On care for our common home". There is also another term, used within the text of the encyclical, that might also have provided a subtitle for the encyclical.  This is the term "integral ecology", and it indicates that the encyclical does not advocate for a kind of ideological environmentalism.

When we speak of the “environment”, what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it. ... We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.

After exploring ideas of environmental, economic and social ecology, of cultural ecology, and of an ecology of daily life Pope Francis addressed the principle of the common good. Towards the end of his account of an ecology of daily life, Pope Francis wrote:

Human ecology also implies another profound reality: the relationship between human life and the moral law, which is inscribed in our nature and is necessary for the creation of a more dignified environment. Pope Benedict XVI spoke of an “ecology of man”, based on the fact that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will”. It is enough to recognize that our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings. The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. ...

The texts for the Mass for the Care of Creation are reflective of this sense of an integral ecology. (The translation from the Latin is mine.)

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims the work of his hands (Entry antiphon)

Father, who in Christ, the first born of all creatures, called the universe into existence, grant, we pray, that docile to your Spirit the breath of life, we may in charity care for the work of your hands. (Collect)

May the sacrament of unity that we have received, Father, increase our communion with you and our brothers, so that, looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, we may duly learn to live at one with all creatures. (Prayer after Communion)

Placing this new Mass formulary in the context of the Jubilee 2025, the Prayer for the Jubilee contains the following:

May your grace transform us into tireless cultivators of the seeds of the Gospel. May those seeds transform from within both humanity and the whole cosmos in the sure expectation of a new heaven and a new earth ...

 

 

Havel's "Politics of Conscience" and Pope Francis' "Laudato si": surprising parallels

In the last week of the (not) long (enough) summer holiday that is a perk of the teaching profession, I have been reading Michael Zantovsky's Havel: A Life. It is a substantial biography of Vaclav Havel, playwright, dissident (in the very specific meaning of that term during the 1970's and 1980's), advocate of human rights and, eventually, president of then Czechoslovakia after its "velvet revolution" of 1989. My progress has been slow as, when works by Havel that I already have on my bookshelves are referred to by Zantovsky, I have been abandoning the biography to read them. One of these works was Havel's essay "Politics and Conscience".

Havel's essay "Politics and Conscience" (link to English translation from here; I have a print copy in a book entitled Vaclav Havel: Living in Truth) was written in February 1984 as a speech to be delivered on receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail. Havel himself was prevented from travelling to Toulouse for the occasion as the Czech authorities had confiscated his passport; the text was first circulated in a samizdat publication(underground publishing) in Czechoslovakia. There are striking similarities between Havel's text and chapters three and four of Pope Francis' encyclical letter Laudato si. Compare, for example, the opening paragraph of Havel's essay (written, like the remainder of the essay, from an existentialist background):

As a boy, I lived for some time in the country and I clearly remember an experience from those days: I used to walk to school in a nearby village along a cart track through the fields and, on the way, see on the horizon a huge smokestack of some hurriedly built factory, in all likelihood in the service of war. It spewed dense brown smoke and scattered it across the sky. Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens. I have no idea whether there was something like a science of ecology in those days; if there was, I certainly knew nothing of it. Still that "soiling of the heavens" offended me spontaneously. It seemed to me that, in it, humans are guilty of something, that they destroy something important, arbitrarily disrupting the natural order of things, and that such things cannot go unpunished. To be sure, my revulsion was largely aesthetic; I knew nothing then of the noxious emissions which would one day devastate our forests, exterminate game, and endanger the health of people.

and n.115 of Pope Francis' encyclical (the quotations are respectively from Romano Guardini and Pope John Paul II):

Modern anthropocentrism has paradoxically ended up prizing technical thought over reality, since “the technological mind sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere ‘given’, as an object of utility, as raw material to be hammered into useful shape; it views the cosmos similarly as a mere ‘space’ into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference”. The intrinsic dignity of the world is thus compromised. When human beings fail to find their true place in this world, they misunderstand themselves and end up acting against themselves: “Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given, but, man too is God’s gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed”.

Both Havel and Pope Francis address the place of technology, and the dominance of what Pope Francis terms a "technological paradigm", not only in its impact on the natural world but also in its impact on how persons live in society, on economic and political life. Both argue against a "depersonalised" (Havel's word) exercise of political power, driven by technology, ideology, consumerism etc, and in favour of a resumption on the part of the individual person of their own responsibility towards the world around them and towards their neighbours. Both warn that solutions that are merely technological in nature will not suffice, and that solutions need to be sought that will reform the way in which people live. What Havel terms "anti-political politics" (cf the last paragraph of section IV, but you need to read the two preceding paragraphs to fully grasp this idea) has an affinity to what Pope Francis terms "the common good" (Laudato sinn.156-158).

Interestingly, in his essay Havel can refer to "science as displacing God and taking over his throne", though one should not thereby infer a religious belief on his part. Rather, if the essay is seen in its whole, Havel is recognising that there is something transcendent, and deserving of respect, in the world in which we live; and something in the human person that seeks to recognise and live in harmony with that transcendence. Pope Francis, of course, can situate this within an explicit teaching on the world as created by God.

Pope Francis, in Laudato si, sought to approach the question from the point of view of offering a teaching about mankind's relationship to the natural world in which we live.  Havel, though he opens his essay by considering the ecological question, primarily seeks to offer a warning to Western European nations about the depersonalized and dehumanizing exercise of power to which he was subject under a Communist regime but which he saw in their nations under the guise of technology, consumerism and a politics of system and bureaucracy. From different directions, they approach the same question, the question that, since the publication of Laudato si, might be termed the question of an "integral ecology"; though the different directions of approach and their different immediate contexts also explain the treatment of different specific questions, particularly in Laudato si
To fully appreciate the proximity of the thought expressed in Havel's essay to that in chapters three and four of Laudato si, I think you have to read the full texts themselves .....

Ideological colonisation?

During his visit to the Philippines in January, Pope Francis warned against an "ideological colonisation" of the family - Pope says "ideological colonisation" threatens traditional family.

Pope Francis on Friday warned against an "ideological colonisation of the family," a reference to gay marriage around the world and to a heated debate in the Philippines about a government population control plan.

The Pope made his impromptu comments at rally for families in Manila on a day that began with an appeal to the government to tackle corruption and hear the cries of the poor suffering from "scandalous social inequalities" in Asia's most Catholic country.

It is interesting in this context to watch Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta's response to  US President Barack Obama's comments on gay rights, during a press conference. It can be found in the second embedded clip of the BBC News report: Kenya: Trials would aid fight against corruption - Obama. (There is a certain disingenuity in President Obama's reference to "love", the term "love" here being typically undefined).

More recently, President Obama urged world leaders to heed Pope Francis' call in Laudato Si for action on climate change: Obama calls for world leaders to heed Pope Francis’s message.

“We have a profound responsibility to protect our children, and our children’s children, from the damaging impacts of climate change.”

But Laudato Si, n.155, reads as follows (emphasis added):

Human ecology also implies another profound reality: the relationship between human life and the moral law, which is inscribed in our nature and is necessary for the creation of a more dignified environment. Pope Benedict XVI spoke of an “ecology of man”, based on the fact that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will”. It is enough to recognize that our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings. The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment. It is not a healthy attitude which would seek “to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it”.

A reference from this paragraph refers to Pope Francis' General Audience catechesis of 15th April 2015, during which Pope Francis discussed the significance of the "alliance between man and woman":

God entrusted the earth to the alliance between man and woman: its failure deprives the earth of warmth and darkens the sky of hope. The signs are already worrisome, and we see them. I would like to indicate, among many others, two points that I believe call for urgent attention.

The first. There is no doubt that we must do far more to advance women, if we want to give more strength to the reciprocity between man and woman. In fact, it is necessary that woman not only be listened to more, but that her voice carry real weight, a recognized authority in society and in the Church. .....

A second reflection concerns the topic of man and woman created in the image of God. I wonder if the crisis of collective trust in God, which does us so much harm, and makes us pale with resignation, incredulity and cynicism, is not also connected to the crisis of the alliance between man and woman. In fact the biblical account, with the great symbolic fresco depicting the earthly paradise and original sin, tells us in fact that the communion with God is reflected in the communion of the human couple and the loss of trust in the heavenly Father generates division and conflict between man and woman.

Across all three - President Obama, President Kenyatta and Pope Francis - there is an intriguing similarity of themes, but also a striking difference.

President Kenyatta appears to have articulated a very competent resistance to the colonisation of the culture of his country by an issue that is not foremost in the minds of its citizens.

[Whilst decriminalisation of homosexual activity might well be a step that the Catholic Church would consider desirable, I think we should recognise that the agenda represented by President Obama's remarks goes further than that.]

First Glance at Laudato si

I have just had my first very quick read of some parts of Pope Francis' Encyclical Letter Laudato si.

I haven't by any means read it all, but have read enough to recognise that to characterise the Encyclical as being "about climate change" is simply not to do it justice. It contains a very wide ranging account of mankind's relation to the rest of the created world, and of the relation of that created world to its Creator. This theme in particular tempted me to reflect that, if one follows Pope Francis teaching, one would avoid the danger of an ecological concern that becomes an ideology because it is divorced from a relation to a Person. There is no possibility of coming away from a reading of Pope Francis' encyclical without recognising a teaching about the specific place and dignity of the human person among God's creatures.

Three quick thoughts.

1. I was very interested in Pope Francis' attribution to St Francis of Assisi of what he terms an "integral ecology". The account of St Francis' attitude to the created world in nn.10-12 of the Laudato si appears to me rich in its implications for how we understand St Francis life and his thought.

2. Am I right to recognise in the following passages something of the thought familiar to the FAITH Movement? See here,  here and here.

In this universe, shaped by open and intercommunicating systems, we can discern countless forms of relationship and participation. This leads us to think of the whole as open to God’s transcendence, within which it develops. Faith allows us to interpret the meaning and the mysterious beauty of what is unfolding.... [n.79]

Human beings, even if we postulate a process of evolution, also possess a uniqueness which cannot be fully explained by the evolution of other open systems. Each of us has his or her own personal identity and is capable of entering into dialogue with others and with God himself. Our capacity to reason, to develop arguments, to be inventive, to interpret reality and to create art, along with other not yet discovered capacities, are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology. The sheer novelty involved in the emergence of a personal being within a material universe presupposes a direct action of God and a particular call to life and to relationship on the part of a “Thou” who addresses himself to another “thou”. The biblical accounts of creation invite us to see each human being as a subject who can never be reduced to the status of an object. [n.81]

The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things. Here we can add yet another argument for rejecting every tyrannical and irresponsible domination of human beings over other creatures. The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things. Human beings, endowed with intelligence and love, and drawn by the fullness of Christ, are called to lead all creatures back to their Creator. [n.83]

3. In the account of "Technology: Creativity and Power" [n.102 ff], Pope Francis refers six times to the thought of Romano Guardini. The particular work referred to has, in English translation, the title The End of the Modern World, though I suspect the original German title, Das Ende der Neuzeit, contains a subtlety lost in the English. My own familiarity with Guardini's thought on the theme of technology, nature and the human person comes from another book, Letters from Lake Como. Two visits to Lake Como in the space of the last year have given me a deeper appreciation of Guardini's book. I was delighted - and not surprised - to see Pope Francis obvious familiarity with Romano Guardini and his willingness to cite him in Laudato si.

See here for an account of the influence of Romano Guardini on Pope Francis and in Laudato si.