It is heartening and not at all surprising that Pope Francis stresses throughout his new encyclical—or at least the draft leaked earlier this week—how important it is to avoid harming the world’s poor, indeed, to facilitate their rising out of poverty instead. His recognition of the goodness of the physical creation rightly brings joy to everyone who appreciates, and wants to enhance, its beauty, fruitfulness, and safety. There are many things to applaud in this encyclical.
The encyclical’s treatment of climate change, however, is markedly different, and there are, before we even get to the substance, two textual clues to this.
First, climate change is the focus of only 2 percent of the encyclical. Second, in the rest of the encyclical Pope Francis cites an average of 1.4 sources per section. But in the four sections on climate change—the subject on which Francis’s life and office leave him most in need of them—there are none.
