It’s more than 150 pages long with lots of commentary on climate, water scarcity, waste, the state of humanity, poverty, consumption, justice, morality and technology. But for all the papal encyclical’s reliance on peer-reviewed science and state of the art environmental analysis, there is only one brief mention by Pope Francis of the massive population growth that has overwhelmed many countries in the past 50 years as a direct result of Catholic teaching. And there are just 11 mentions of women.

These two whopping elephants in the Basilica of St Peter throw some doubt on whether the encyclical is really a radical analysis of the state of the world intended to speak to everyone, as Francis has said he wants it to be, or is aimed at the upper echelons of a divided church in need of fresh teachings.

The Vatican has never fully grasped that women are the greatest asset for development and environmental protection

The Vatican has never fully grasped that women are the world’s greatest asset for development and environmental protection, or that having 90 million extra mouths a year to feed, almost all in the world’s poorer countries, inevitably puts nature and poor countries’ resources under immense extra pressure.

In a passage that could come straight from an academic text or a modern northern liberal NGO eager not to offend, the Pope says to blame population growth rather than extreme consumerism for any of the world’s ills is “an attempt to legitimise the present model of distribution”. However, by declaring family planning off limits in a major discussion about the global environment and development, he may also have weakened his central argument that poverty and environmental destruction everywhere go hand in hand.

Instead, his broad popular message is aimed at countries such as the Philippines, Mexico and Brazil which, with about 350 million Catholics between them, dominate the church’s interests. Here Francis the superstar knows his audience and has positioned himself as the most powerful, possibly the only, voice of the global south.

Here, too, the encyclical becomes highly political – chiming with the simmering frustrations and agendas of popular mass movements and agrarian groups who are already hostile to multinational companies.



But by publicly scolding the financial elites, neo-liberals and the politicians of rich countries who, he argues, have monopolised the world’s resources, the radical Francis links straight to the liberation theologists of the 1960s and 70s. This powerful Latin American movement of priests greatly influenced popular movements in that region before the Vatican, under Pope John Paul II, tried to squash it by excommunicating its leaders.

Liberation theology retreated but it never disappeared and now Francis’s fresh teaching that the church is “for the poor” adds environmental responsibility to the older radical arguments for fundamental political change as a response to the poverty and the ill-treatment of ordinary people.

Significantly, too, the encyclical has been welcomed by many of the world’s most influential non-faith organisations and liberal thinktanks, like Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth International, the World Resources Institute, UN bodies and academics around the world.



For these northern organisations now moving strongly into developing countries, Francis’s moral arguments add weight to the scientific and economic case they have long made to try to persuade politicians and business to act on climate change, pollution and waste. Pointed criticisms of the finance sector, and the “false gods” of consumerism and profit, chime just as well in Berlin and London as in Quito and Manila.

Equally, the encyclical will ensure the powerful business and fossil-fuel lobbies pressing for a weak climate agreement in Paris in November are made to squirm. It suggests that the poor countries should fight hard, not just to make the rich cut their emissions significantly, but also to get the money to allow them to adapt their economies to climate change.

By exposing the present immorality of forcing developing countries to cut their emissions more than the rich, Pope Francis may have got close to the heart of the debate about how we can all develop.