If by chance you found yourself with time on your hands or needed a change of pace from reading novels or work papers/ gardening/ watching TV/ walking , this could be the time to look again, or for the first time, at Laudato Si (Praise Be!). For anyone who is at all interested in the Church’s social teaching and the environment, and wants to approach it in a readable way (not always the case with documents from Rome,) this is the one to read. The Pope took ‘Francis’ as his name as Pope, the first one to do so, because of his interest in the environment and here he has a very personal approach, speaking about the countryside’s affect on his early life and his love of it thereafter. It is imbued with St. Francis’s closeness to Creation, his speaking to it as a living thing of which he is part, and it challenges us as well. You can find it on the web or I can let you have a copy.
Kendal Catholic Priest 