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Deep in Hell, in the ninth ring of the eighth circle, Dante encounters a group of souls who have gone to pieces. One is slit “from the chin right down to where men fart”; his entrails dangle between his legs.
A second, whose hands have been lopped off, gestures with gory stumps. A third holds his own severed head by the hair. These were, in life, sowers of discord, who, for the divisions they created, will spend eternity hacked into bits.
“In me you may observe fit punishment,” the severed head helpfully points out.
The subcircle of the schismatics came to mind this week, when someone—presumably a Vatican insider—leaked a copy of Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change and the environment three days before its official release.
The leaked document appeared on the Web site of the Italian weekly L’Espresso on Monday, with a brief introduction that declared, triumphantly, “Here it is.”
The whodunit story of how the magazine obtained the document quickly edged out coverage of the encyclical itself, which, at that point, most of the world couldn’t read, because only the Italian version had been posted.
The Turin daily La Stampa described the episode as a giallo—Italian shorthand for a detective novel. Whoever had passed along the Pope’s letter, the newspaper speculated, had a “double goal”: to undermine the message of the encyclical and to undermine Pope Francis.
Vatican officials asked journalists from other publications to refrain from reporting on the version released by L’Espresso, a request that the majority pointedly ignored.
The encyclical, which is titled “Laudato si’ ”—“Be Praised,” a line borrowed from “The Canticle of the Sun,” a poem attributed to the Pope’s namesake, St. Francis—was finally officially released Thursday, as planned, in Rome. (It was very similar to the leaked version.)
The Vatican made available translations not just in English but also in German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Though a work built, like Dante’s, around the ideal of love (in the English version, the word “love” appears sixty-seven times), “Laudato si’ ” is, at the same time, an unsparing indictment of just about every aspect of modern life.
And though its focus is on man’s relationship to nature, it also has much to say about man’s relationship to his fellow man and to himself—little of it laudatory.
The vision that Pope Francis offers in his encyclical is of a world spiralling toward disaster, in which people are too busy shopping and checking their cell phones to do, or even care, much about it. Continue reading
- Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999.
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