Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ lacked both “the gender lens” and, consequently, the perspective of indigenous change-makers in communities hardest hit by the climate disaster, Catholic activists and academics were told at a celebration of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute (LSRI) in Oxford.
Originally scheduled to launch the Institute last year but postponed due to the pandemic, the event was entitled Realistic Hope: Theological Ethics and Conservation Practice. Speakers highlighted the transformative environmental activism of women in indigenous communities but lamented that this work was often overlooked by the Church.
Cardinal Michael Czerny SJ, of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Holy See’s Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, applauded the institute’s “ambitious and necessary mission, which is for societal transformation”, pointing to “poor campesinas, indigenous and slum women who keep regenerating an agenda that starts with access to basic living conditions for their families and children”.
He singled out for inspiration indigenous Honduran environmental activist Berta Ca´ceres, murdered in 2016.
The cardinal was responding to a paper by Professor Lisa Sowle Cahill of Boston College, who felt that Laudato Si’ lacks “the gender lens, not only to register the disproportionate effects of environmental harms on women, but especially to endorse and encourage women’s own political efficacy as change-agents”.
She noted that “in the Amazon and other regions indigenous women forcefully resist the extractive industries, militate for pollution clean-ups and advocate for indigenous land rights and agriculture against mining contracts, logging, cattle farming and monoculture”. She lamented that “consequences for these women include harassment, rape and murder”.
Yet she felt Laudato Si’ developed Catholic social thought, especially the inclusion of all species and the planet “in an interconnected whole” and the diagnosis of the key problem as “lack of political will”.
Enric Sala of National Geographic warned about the impact of ecosystem disruption and urged a halt to destroying wild regions. He felt Covid-19 is a reminder that “conservation is not just a luxury for rich countries ... our very survival depends on our being better members of the biosphere, our larger community”.
LSRI director Celia Deane- Drummond told The Tablet that the institute will be “drawing on the intellectual resources of different academic disciplines and the wisdom of religious traditions, including insight from those living in the global south”. She added: “We aim for a dialogical approach that is deliberately inclusive of the most marginalised, including those earthly creatures that have no voice but our own.”
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