Pope restructured encyclical to enhance accessibility

Friday, June 26th, 2015

Pope Francis deliberately restructured his environment encyclical Laudato Si’ in order to make it accessible to everyone.

Italian Bishop Mario Tosi, formerly secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said the Pope changed the structure of the document from its first draft.

The initial version had a long introduction of a theological, liturgical, sacramental and spiritual character, Bishop Tosi said.

Had it stayed this way, it would have been addressed more immediately to the Catholic world, the bishop said.

Rather, Francis moved the theological part to the middle and end, as he also did with passages on spirituality and education.

The final document was structured so as to present a consideration of the situation, as well as an evaluation and a “prefiguration of practical guidelines” for working on a solution, the bishop said.

“He thus wanted to involve the largest possible number of readers, including non-believers, in a thought process that, to a large extent, can be shared by all.”

The encyclical, released last Thursday, was addressed to “every living person on the planet”.

“I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home,” Pope Francis wrote.

Writing at UCA News, Fr William Grimm noted that the encyclical has been published without a Latin version.

In an article posted on June 22, Fr Grimm wrote that the only versions on the Vatican website are Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.

“As Pope Francis tries to wean the Catholic Church from the top-down, centralised way of life and thought that has characterised it for the past few centuries and bring us back to a more traditional form of Church life, he is looking to the voices of communities throughout the world.

“That is symbolised in his not using the Vatican’s official language, Latin,” Fr Grimm wrote.

Sources