Here’s a “study guide” and reflection to go along with these thoughts if you’re interested!
Most readers of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ approach it as an ecological document. It is that, of course. It gives us the vocabulary of “integral ecology,” names the Cry of the Earth Cry of the Poor (Leo Boff), and pushes Christians to confront the ecological devastation happening right in our backyards. But reading it alongside one of my favorite thinkers, Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), has helped me see the encyclical in a deeper light. It is not only a call for ecological reform. It is a call for a renewed way of perceiving the world.
Stein, a phenomenologist and later a Carmelite nun, insists that the world discloses itself through relationship. We never encounter things as isolated objects. We encounter them as bearers of meaning whose inner life we sense through empathy. For Stein, empathy is not a poetic metaphor. It is a rigorous description of how consciousness crosses its boundaries to meet another being. It is how we come to understand the interiority of others without consuming or controlling them.
Laudato Si’ is animated by that same intuition. Pope Francis keeps returning to the idea that “everything is connected,” but what he is really describing is a spiritual and perceptual crisis. Our ecological wounds begin when our ways of seeing become fragmented. When we lose the felt sense that forests, rivers, neighborhoods, economies, and human bodies are interwoven, exploitation becomes easier and empathy becomes harder. Ecological conversion, in this sense, is a conversion of attention.
Stein helps here. She gives us the philosophical grounding for what Francis calls integral ecology. If empathy allows us to cross the boundary between self and other, then ecological empathy allows us to recognize the interior life of the more than human world. It opens the possibility that trees have presence, that watersheds have their own rhythm, that nonhuman creatures have ways of encountering God that do not depend on our interpretation. Francis gestures toward this when he speaks of creation as “a caress of God” that invites us to respond.
But integral ecology also requires a horizon. This is where the encyclical resonates with another thinker I have been returning to often in my doctoral work: John Haught. Haught argues that the universe is unfinished. Creation is still unfolding, still becoming, still drawn forward by promise. That future-oriented pull gives ecological ethics its energy. We act not only to preserve the past but to participate in the world’s future fulfillment.
When you place Stein and Haught in conversation with Francis, a striking picture emerges. Integral ecology is not simply an environmental policy or a social framework. It is a disciplined way of being present to the world. It asks us to hold the interiority of creation (Stein) together with the open-ended future of creation (Haught) inside a posture of hope and responsibility (Francis).
For me, this is where ecological intentionality takes shape. We learn to pay attention differently. We learn to sense the connections between the walnut tree in the backyard, the creek behind the subdivision, the groceries we buy, the digital tools we use, and the wider cosmic processes that made any of this possible. We begin to feel ourselves as participants in a living, relational world rather than spectators or managers.
Stein once wrote that empathy begins in stillness. Laudato Si’ suggests that ecological healing does too. When we slow down, when we listen, when we let the world address us rather than rushing to master it, we discover a deeper truth that has been present from the beginning. Creation is not a backdrop. It is a communion. And communion requires both interior attention and shared responsibility. That, I think, is the heart of what Pope Francis is trying to teach us.
If we take Stein seriously, and take Laudato Si’ seriously, then integral ecology is not a distant ideal. It is a practice of learning how to see.
More to read on these ideas:
Benedict XVI. Caritas in Veritate. Vatican Publishing House, 2009.
Deane-Drummond, Celia. “Joining in the Dance: Catholic Social Teaching and Ecology.” New Blackfriars 93, no. 1045 (2012): 193–212.
Francis. Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Vatican Publishing House, 2015.
Gregersen, Niels Henrik. “Introduction.” In Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, edited by Niels Henrik Gregersen, 1–21. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015.
Haught, John F. “The Unfinished Sacrament of Creation.” In Ecotheology: A Christian Conversation, edited by Kiara A. Jorgenson and Alan G. Padgett, 166–188. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020.
Johnson, Elizabeth A. “Jesus and the Cosmos: Soundings in Deep Christology.” In Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, edited by Niels Henrik Gregersen, 133–156. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015.
Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989.
Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002.