India, March 2 -- In his second encyclical, Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home (2015), Pope Francis offers a sustained moral critique of consumerism, unrestrained economic expansion, and ecological indifference. Lamenting environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and the erosion of social cohesion, he calls for "swift and unified global action." Rejecting a reductive interpretation of human "dominion" over the earth, Francis advances an integral vision of creation as a "universal family" marked by radical interdependence. Social and environmental crises, he argues, are not discrete phenomena but dimensions of a single, complex emergency requiring holistic resolution.

A central theme of the encyclical is the ethi...