Creation, Sin, and Debt

T here is no denying that the recent papal encyclical, Laudato si’, represents a sea change in official Catholic social teaching.1 For one thing, it is addressed not simply to the bishops nor even to each member of the Catholic Church but to “every person living on this planet” (§3); for another, it speaks from the perspective of the global South and names the debts owed by the North to the South (§51). After decades of tension between the liberation theologies emerging within the developing world and the traditional Catholic faith as preserved within the developed world (not least by the current pope’s immediate predecessor), this pope has made his debt to liberation theology explicit by italicizing words corresponding to the title of the seminal and influential work of Leonardo Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (see §49). In consonance with Boff’s analysis, the encyclical traces the roots of the ecological crisis to the mind-set of a modern civilization that has equally destructive effects on the lives of the poor and the health of the planet. The encyclical adeptly weaves the new perspective of universal connectedness found in ecological thinking with liberationist concerns for economic justice as well as with more traditional Catholic social thinking grounded in the idea of the common good. Together, these three perspectives offer a more explicit and emphatic challenge to the politically dominant paradigms of economic liberalism and neoliberalism than ever before. It will therefore be helpful to explore the grounds offered in this encyclical for naming the dominant economic norms of the developed world as “sin.” The encyclical names as “sin” the breaking of a threefold relationship of a person to God, to neighbor, and to the earth, both outwardly and within themselves. These relationships are so intertwined that to break one results in breaking the others. It starts with the traditional Augustinian account of sin as the self-assertion of human freedom without acknowledging human obligations or natural finitude (§6). For a disruption of