Francis shows us the way as he uses all the prestige

Encyclical puts poor at heart of agenda, writes Philippa Bonella

LAST week’s launch of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si: On the care of our common home is a huge contribution to the debate on the environment around the world. With it, the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF) and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Scotland are given a renewed mandate to bring the concerns of poor people around the world right to the heart of decision-making in Scotland. What we must see now from Scotland is leadership on environmental issues, for the common good.

Catholic aid agencies like SCIAF accompany people in poor countries through the daily hardships they face as they are hit by climate change. Unpredictable rains leave families not knowing when to plant their seeds, while flash floods can wash away their fledgling crops or a drought can destroy their harvest.

Through our international networks such as Caritas and CIDSE, as well as through our national campaigning coalitions, we’ve been calling on world leaders to take action to promote the common good and address climate change for years.

Unfortunately, to date, their actions have fallen well short of what’s needed.

Last week SCIAF, along with CAFOD and many other groups, took part in a mass lobby of our new MPS to urge them to act on climate change. Now, with Laudato Si, we are given renewed hope that the strength of language used by Pope Francis on the failure of leadership in this arena will spur leaders into acting for the common good and in solidarity with the poorest people.

Pope Francis brings together 50 years of Catholic teaching on creation, justice and the common good.

He overlays this with a lyrical sense of the beauty of nature as a hymn to God, and a deep practical understanding of the impact a degraded environment has on the poorest people and on social cohesion. For me, his greatest insight is on the interconnectedness of all things and the inability of technology to address such complex problems. Only people, working and talking together, can find solutions to the challenges we face. There is no quick fix.

Pope Francis challenges us all to look at our lives and our actions in the light of the common good.

He clearly and explicitly links the mindset which permits social injustices and inequality to continue, with the causes of environmental degradation and climate change.

He reminds us that it’s the world’s poorest people who are bearing the brunt of a problem created by the mass consumption of the rich, driven by our unbalanced global economic system which puts profit before people. We have