September is the month of creation, and I’ve been wondering how widely Laudato si’ has been read since it was promulgated in May 2015. I rarely speak to Catholics who have read it; many haven’t even heard of it. This is not a random sample, admittedly, so I resist the temptation to be too gloomy. But I recall Pope Francis commenting that people these days don’t read papal documents. I think he’s right, but it should be remembered that “people” never really have.

Until recently, your average Catholic never read a single word written by a pope in their whole life, not only because many average Catholics were illiterate, but because popes wrote in Latin. So things have hardly got worse.