Laudato si’ update will be apostolic exhortation

It begins on September 1 and ends on October 4.

October 4 is the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, author of the Canticle of Creation, which opens the encyclical Laudato si’ and thus gives it its title. 

In 2020, it was on this same date that the Pontiff – who chose to bear the name of the Umbrian saint – chose to sign his third encyclical – Fratelli Tutti– at the Poverello’s tomb in Assisi.

Apostolic exhortations are often written after a special synod, and are, as the name indicates, an "exhortation."

The encyclical Laudato si’, on safeguarding the common home that God has created for humanity, was written with the backdrop of the United Nations conferences on climate change. 

Pope Francis has recounted the genesis of this text on various occasions, explaining what he discussed with Ségolène Royal, then French Minister for Ecological Transition, during her visit to Strasbourg in 2014. 

He recounted in June:

Rarely has an encyclical had such an echo, even in circles far removed from Catholicism, as the concern about global warming goes well beyond confessional bounds. At the time of its publication, dozens of heads of state welcomed the position taken by the head of the Catholic Church.

While Laudato si’ was not the first encyclical to “address the problem,” it was the first “to take ecology as its sole subject,” points out Dominican Thomas Michelet, in the book Les papes et l’écologie (Artège, 2016). 

The publication of this "sequel" to Laudato si' comes just under two months before COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This country has established itself as a partner of the Holy See on the diplomatic scene since 2019 and the signing on its soil of the Document on Human Fraternity by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayyeb.

Francis himself does not classify it as a “green” encyclical, saying that in fact it falls in the great tradition of the Church’s “social encyclicals.” In it, the Pontiff makes above all a call to personal conversion, noting how the environmental crisis is inseparable from a human crisis.

Here, he picks up the teaching of his predecessors.

Benedict XVI, often dubbed the “green pope,” was a strong advocate of a Christian vision of ecology and what he called a “human ecology.”

In 2010, for example, in his message for that year’s World Day of Peace, he offered this reflection:

September 1 is the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, instituted by Pope Francis in 2015.