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Time and Measures of Success: Interpreting and Implementing Laudato Si’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Laudato Si’ contains a prophetic vision of what time is and is for. It challenges development organisations to think critically about the way they conceive ‘progress’, the way they measure their ‘success’. In doing so, it invites them to ask how they express in their activity a particular conception of the meaning of time. This paper argues that Laudato Si’ proposes a vision of time which is theological, teleological, dialectical and contemplative, and that it is this vision which underpins its contrast between true and false notions of progress. The paper seeks to articulate a foundation for the formulation of authentic ‘measures of success’ that are expressive of this understanding of time, and to imagine what the organisational implications of such measures might be.
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- Copyright © 2019 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
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1 This article is a report commissioned in January 2018 by the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) for its internal use discerning an authentic interpretation and implementation of Laudato Si’ as a development organisation. The author is grateful for their permission to publish it here.
2 All references from here are to Laudato Si’ unless otherwise indicated. Abbreviations are: EG - Evangelii Gaudium; AL – Amoris Laetitia; GE – Gaudete et Exsultate.
3 Homily, 17th April 2015.
4 R. R. Reno, ‘The Return of Catholic Anti-Modernism’, First Things 18th June 2015. Reno describes Laudato Si’ as ‘anti-progressive’. On the account we are giving here, however, this is an over-simple analysis. Rather, Francis is rejecting a certain conception of what constitutes progress.
5 Sachs, ‘The Sustainable Development Goals and Laudato Si’: varieties of Post-Development?’, Third World Quarterly (2017), 8Google Scholar. ‘[T]he chronopolitics of development are conspicuously absent from the encyclical… Progress, and other promises for the future, are non-existent in the document and one gets the impression that the arrow of time that has shaped historical perception for two centuries has simply been done away with… in Laudato Si’ the rejection of the arrow of time is… extreme.’ Puzzlingly, Sachs describes the encyclical as ‘decidedly space focused’; it ‘replaces the arrow of time with spatial consciousness’. This analysis is disputed in the present paper.
6 Cf. Oliver, Simon, ‘Augustine on Creation, Providence and Motion’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 18.4 (2016): 379-98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Monagle, Clare, ‘The politics of extra/ordinary time: Encyclical thinking’, Cogent Arts & Humanities 4 (2017), 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 The Catholic Social Teaching tradition takes the perspective of eternity as enabling the highest affirmation of the temporal. The neglect of an eternal perspective, represented by the false arrow of technocratic time, does not elevate the temporal but actively undermines its goods.
9 A goal which lies outside time casts modern narratives of progress, which identify absolute purposes within history, in critical light. This ‘transcendent futurity orients a politics outside of what we call ‘modernity’’ (Clare Monagle, op. cit., 8). Monagle points out some of the practical difficulties this may cause; she worries that ‘it does not lend itself to an inclusive and negotiated political’. Laudato Si’s call for dialogue and multilateral participation in responding to the ecological crisis represents tells against this charge.
10 ‘The only known model that integrates all aspects of the complex entity that is integral human development is the Holy Trinity. Following the vocation described by Catholic anthropology and social teaching therefore means emulating Trinitarian relations in individual and social lives.’ Grassl, Wolfgang, ‘Integral Human Development in Analytical Perspective: A Trinitarian Model’, Journal of Markets and Morality 16.1 (2013): 135-55Google Scholar.
11 For example, the media need to become ‘sources of new cultural progress’ (47).
12 This is classically formulated in the doctrine of divine impassibility. A well-known recent defence is Weindandy, Thomas, Does God Suffer? (Indiana: UNDP, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 This rather enigmatic phrase appears for the first time at LF 57. It appears again in EG 222-5, LS 178 and AL 3 and 261. The maxim has attracted controversy, and among Francis’ critics, a certain amount of derision (e.g. Sandro Magister, http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1351301bdc4.html?eng=y, accessed 16th May 2018). Massimo Borghesi, Una Biografia Intellettuale, presents a concerted answer to the criticisms, by showing how the maxim is rooted in Pope Francis intellectual commitments. This is briefly considered in Section v. b) below.
14 Pope Francis says that the principle is derived from ‘the pillars of the Church's social doctrine’ (EG 221).
15 Quotations in this paragraph are from EG 223.
16 ‘A Big Heart Open to God’, interview given to Antonio Spadaro, La Civiltà Cattolica, 19th September 2013.
17 Homily 12th April, 2013. The phrase ‘Time is God's messenger’ originates with Peter Faber. One of Francis’ first acts as Pope was to canonise Faber, whom he recognises as a role model for his own ministry.
18 ‘The Lord saves us in history… [he] does not work as a fairy with a magic wand.’ ‘Triumphalism’ is ‘a great temptation in Christian life to which not even the Apostles were immune’. ‘Triumphalism is not of the Lord’, who ‘teaches us that in life everything is not magic’ (Homily 12th April, 2013).
19 Romano Guardini, Der Gegensatz, was a key influence and the subject of Francis’ uncompleted doctoral dissertation. In the background are Adam Mohler, Maurice Blondel, Henri de Lubac and Erich Pryzywara.
20 Massimo Borghesi, Una Biografia Intellettuale, is the first systematic treatment of Francis’ ‘dialectical thinking’. An English translation is yet to be released. My account here relies on the helpful treatment in Flipper, Joseph S., ‘The Time of Encounter in the Political Theology of Pope Francis’, in Cavadini, John C. and Wallenfang, Donald, eds., Pope Francis and the Event of Encounter (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2018): 201-226Google Scholar, and more briefly Austen Ivereigh's review of the Italian text; 18th November 2017, https://cruxnow.com/book-review/2017/11/18/new-book-looks-intellectual-history-francis-pope-polarity/ (accessed 16th May 2018).
21 Homily, 1st February 2018.
22 Homily, 1st February 2018.
23 Bonaventure may be a background influence here. Bonaventure's theology of history frames Christ in the midst of history, in contrast to Augustine, who frames Christ at the end of history.
24 Catechesis, 4th December 2014.
25 In articulating the technocratic paradigm, Romano Guardini is a key source for Pope Francis. Francis explains: ‘This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation’ (106).
26 Homily, World Youth Day, 27th July 2013. Pope Francis’ critique of the technocratic paradigm demonstrates how time is always storied―our experience of it is never neutral, but is always narrated in one way or another. Efficiency and pragmatism are one such story. These stories call for unpacking, an unpacking which will always be theological, for time can only be known by implicit contrast to non-time.
27 Sachs is right to observe that ‘a strong propensity towards anti-utilitarianism is recognisable throughout the encyclical’ (op. cit. 11), for there is a ‘priority of being over being useful’ (69).
28 ‘A Big Heart Open to God’, interview given to Antonio Spadaro, La Civiltà Cattolica, 19th September 2013.
29 Homily, World Youth Day, 27th July 2013.
30 Homily, 13th September 2016.
31 John C. Cavadini and Donald Wallenfang, eds., Pope Francis and the Event of Encounter (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2018) offers a range of perspectives on Francis’ conception of ‘encounter’.
32 Cf. EG 222-5. We are to allow the weeds and the wheat to grow up together.
33 Homily, 1st February 2018.
34 Homily, 13th September 2016.
35 Cf. Wolfgang Sachs, who comments on the flattening effect of univocal measures of development. ‘Numbers have an enormously homogenising effect: all the diversity and difference in the world boils down into a scale of numbers’. Op. cit., 6.
36 MV21 illuminates a theological framework for accountability. ‘[A]nyone who makes a mistake must pay the price. However, this is just the beginning of conversion, not its end, because one begins to feel the tenderness and mercy of God. God does not deny justice. He rather envelopes it and surpasses it with an even greater event in which we experience love as the foundation of true justice. … God's justice is his mercy given to everyone… the Cross of Christ is God's judgement on all of us and on the whole world, because through it he offers us the certitude of love and new life.’
37 John Paul II stressed the importance to attending to persons at the level of ‘being’, not just at the level of ‘having’. Benedict XVI foregrounds this in connection with development work in Caritatis in Veritate, where he emphasises the need to give not just material resources but also time, training, respect and attention to those receiving aid, lest they remain subordinate to aid-givers in a kind of dependence (47).
38 Clare Monagle, op. cit., 9.