Greg Marcar is a senior researcher at the Nathaniel Bioethics Centre for Bioethics, Te Kupenga, and a research affiliate at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI), University of Otago (New Zealand). His research interests include religious freedom, theological anthropology, and animal rights. He is a coeditor of Søren Kierkegaard: Theologian of the Gospel (Wipf & Stock 2021) and Security, Religion, and the Rule of Law: International Perspectives (Routledge 2023). A version of this post is scheduled to appear as a contribution to The Nathaniel Report 75 (2025).

The papacy of Francis I has frequently been framed as a departure from his predecessors. Francis is notable for being not only the first Jesuit pope but also the first South American pontiff and the first to take office in the context of a pope emeritus, the late Benedict XVI. As many have noted, no previous pontiff has shone such a strong theological spotlight onto socioeconomic or environmental issues that disproportionately affect those living within the developing world or displaced from it.

At the level of Catholic doctrine, Francis deserves to be remembered for changing the Church’s Catechism in 2018 to reflect an unequivocal opposition to capital punishment. It is perhaps on his further proposed change to the Catechism that Pope Francis’s hopeful legacy is most clearly in focus. In the context of supporting the recognition of “ecocide” within international criminal law, Francis stated in a 2019 address,“We must introduce—we are thinking about it—in the Catechism of the Catholic Church the sin against ecology, the ecological sin against the common home.” In this, Francis makes a theological claim that is often unsaid or denied by others: our interaction with the “natural” world implicates our relationship to God.

It has been suggested that Pope Francis’s “ecological” concern, along with that of his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (Praise Be: On Care for Our Common Home), represents a new theological trajectory for the Church. Through a brief comparison with Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, I suggest a partial defense of this claim.

Public Faith and Our Common Home

One of Pope Francis’s first references to the earth as our “common home” occurs in the 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. In discussing the Church’s teachings on social questions, Francis asserts, “It is no longer possible to claim that religion . . . exists only to prepare souls for heaven. . . . Consequently, no one can demand that religion should be relegated to the inner sanctum of personal life” (para. 182­­–83). Drawing on the examples of St. Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Calcutta (whose sainthood Pope Francis would subsequently recognize in 2016), Evangelii Gaudium proceeds to affirm that

[a]n authentic faith . . . always involves a deep desire to change the world . . . to leave this earth somehow better that we found it. We love this magnificent planet on which God has put us, and we love the human family which dwells here . . . . The earth is our common home and all of us are brothers and sisters (para. 183, emphasis added).

As in the Pope’s later teaching in Laudato Si’, the need to affirm the earth as our common home is here inextricably linked to our need to affirm a certain familial solidarity with the rest of humanity (“the human family” in which “all of us are brothers and sisters”). Perhaps even more fundamental, however, is the link between Francis’s remarks on caring for our shared earth and the need to recognize the necessarily external demands of an “authentic faith.” As the preceding paragraph of Evangelii Gaudium makes clear, the confinement of religiosity to an “inner sanctum” must be rejected for a faith that is uncompromisingly turned toward others and toward the world.

In this, Pope Francis stands in continuity with Benedict XVI. In his inaugural sermon as pope, Benedict XVI poignantly spoke of how “[t]he external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast.” This line is quoted by Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ to call attention to how a concern for (external) desertification can be a catalyst for interior renewal (Laudato Si’, para. 217). For both Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, the internal suffering and alienation experienced by human beings goes hand in hand with the impoverishment of God’s wider creation, such that concern with one necessarily entails concern with the other.

In Pope Francis, however, we find a far more explicit insistence that attending to the external world is in fact part of renewing our internal life. This is exemplified most tellingly by the saint from which he chose his papal name—“the figure of Saint Francis,” through which “we come to realize that a healthy relationship with creation is one dimension of overall personal conversion” (Laudato Si’, para. 218). Christian faith for Pope Francis, as with St. Francis, is necessarily a public orientation toward God’s presence within creation.

A Tale of Two Saints?

This comparison between St. Francis and the pope who bears his name is further illuminated by briefly reflecting on Pope Francis’s own description of his canonized namesake in Laudato Si’. The title of this encyclical derives from St. Francis’s famous canticle, in which he praises God for his “brothers” and “sisters” within the nonhuman creation. Drawing on the portrayal of St. Francis that we find in Thomas of Celano (1200–60) and St. Bonaventure (1221–74), Pope Francis expands on St. Francis’s doxological modus operandi, explaining that,

[j]ust as happens when we fall in love with someone, whenever [St. Francis] would gaze at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals, he burst into song, drawing all other creatures into his praise (Laudato Si’, para. 11).

Quoting from St. Bonaventure’s Major Legend of Saint Francis, Pope Francis notes how, “from a reflection on the primary source of all things, filled with even more abundant piety, [St. Francis] would call creatures, no matter how small, by the name of ‘brother’ or ‘sister.’” Through faithful reflection and love for God as Creator of all that exists, St. Francis is motivated by his piety to an external love for creation. In titling his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis consciously aligns himself with St. Francis’s joyful praise of God and consequent love for all other creatures as his siblings in God. This, Pope Francis tells us, was the foundation for St. Francis’s care for our “common home.” By implication, it is also the theological starting point for Pope Francis.

Here again, an instructive comparison may be made with Benedict XVI and the saint whom he chose as a namesake: Benedict of Nursia (480–547). In a 2008 General Audience reflecting on the life and work of St. Benedict, Benedict XVI speaks of how this “Founder of Western Monasticism” began his spiritual vocation with a period of “solitude with God” as a hermit in Subiaco (Italy). Pope Benedict notes how, during this time, St. Benedict mastered the temptations of self-centeredness, sensuality, and retributive anger. This provided Benedict with an inner discipline and peace, from which he went on to make profound and lasting contributions to Western monasticism, theology, and society.

In these two figures—St. Francis on the one hand and St. Benedict on the other—we can therefore see two paradigmatic responses to one Christian faith. In St. Francis, pious reflection on God as the “primary source of all things” (in Bonaventure’s words) provided the catalyst to externally address God in praise (Laudato Si’) and turn in thanksgiving toward the rest of His creation. In St. Benedict, an internal desire to please God and cultivate inner theological virtue preceded his work in founding the monastic rule that would provide the foundation for Christian spiritual life across Europe.

Here also, I suggest, is one way of understanding Pope Francis’s relationship to his Benedict-inspired predecessor. Just as St. Francis and St. Benedict evidence two different—if complementary—theological foci and orientations, so too do the popes that bear their names. Through his encyclicals, Benedict XVI attends to the nature and cultivation of Christian love (Deus caritas est; Caritas in Veritate) and salvific hope (Spe Salvi). One might say that in truly “Benedictine” spirit, these theologically rich encyclicals explicate how the inner renewal brought about by Christian love and hope implicates our relationships with one another and society at large. This contrasts with the outwardly concerned encyclicals of Francis, whether this concern be for our “common home” (Laudato Si’) or for “the single human family” that dwells within that home (Fratelli Tutti).

It is not that Francis and Benedict XVI harbor different conceptions of the Catholic faith; such a claim would, in any case, be belied by the fact that Francis’s first official encyclical, Fidei Lumen (The Light of Faith), was adapted from notes and drafts by Benedict XVI himself. Rather, Francis’s theology represents an emphasis on faith’s “outwards” movement, through which Pope Francis—following in the footsteps of St. Francis—reaches out toward the whole of creation and its inhabitants. This is exemplified by a homily, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Ignatius of Loyola’s canonization, in which Pope Francis talks of Christ’s ascent up a mountain prior to his Transfiguration (Luke 9:28). The mountain symbolizes, for Francis, “the border between heaven and earth” where God may be encountered. To climb the mountain, one progresses both “upwards” and, simultaneously, “outwards.” This, in brief, is the path of Pope Francis and the outward-facing and public theology that his papacy commends to the Church.