A letter to break our hearts
https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/22458/the-climate-call-for-change
Will the climate deniers and sceptics finally be swayed by Nicolas Brown’s film, The Letter: A Message For Our Earth?
In Laudato Si’, history’s most-read encyclical letter, Pope Francis talks of the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. Now a powerful new film lets the audience see and hear those cries.
One year from COP26 in Glasgow, carbon levels in the atmosphere continue to climb and wild fires rage across the earth; why do we stare at the precipice, paralysed? What stops us from acting when droughts dry up Europe’s farmlands and floods wipe out Pakistan’s agriculture, and villages on Africa’s coasts vanish beneath rising seas? Is the scale of the challenge too vast, the change it calls for so great that we can offer only apathy – denial, even?
How to explain, for example, that our present government believed it possible or popular to argue for growth by rejecting the UK’s climate commitments, and tried to pack the Cabinet with climate-deniers and sceptics who even now are busy organising a bonfire of net-zero measures? How is this even possible?
On 4 October in Rome, I brought the question closer to home. That evening was the Vatican premiere of a film called The Letter: A Message For Our Earth, and I was at a morning press conference with the people behind it: the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the Laudato Si’ Movement, the film’s director, as well as its key protagonists.
Why was it, I asked, that seven years on from Laudato Si’, the response of the Catholic Church worldwide to Pope Francis’ groundbreaking encyclical has been at best patchy, and too often one of indifference or even hostility? It is not, after all, for want of example from Rome. Laudato Si’ , which came out in 2015, is history’s most-read encyclical: it was instrumental in bringing about the 1.5 degree commitment made at the COP21 UN Climate “Conference of Parties” in Paris that year, to which the Holy See – and Pope Francis, with growing exasperation – have been trying to hold the nations at every COP since, and again now in the run-up to COP27 in November in Sharm el-Sheikh.
To underscore the point: just before the screening of The Letter that evening of 4 October, Feast of St Francis of Assisi, the Holy See officially acceded to the Paris agreement commitments, which has involved a host of climate-friendly changes in and around the Vatican. Yet in your local parish, diocese and school, such full-on commitment is hard to find – especially from the pulpit. The global synod process has brought to the surface a stark contrast between poor parts of the Church, where climate is a literally a life-or-death matter – in Oceania, it headlines the report of the dioceses of the Pacific Ocean – and the Church in the rich world where, if it comes up at all, it is in the list of things the Church needs to speak up about more.
Hence my question to Cardinal Michael Czerny, dicastery prefect, and Dr Lorna Gold, president of the Laudato Si’ Movement, which has more than 900 Catholic-affiliated organisations. Gold agreed that the Church’s reception had been uneven, that the environment was still not seen as of “central importance”, and hoped that The Letter might change that. Czerny said we needed to “figure out obstacles” to conversion, including the temptation to see it as a “green” issue, and to ask: “What am I protecting or defending?” These were good answers that described the challenge. Most Catholics, like most people, “other” the issue: it’s a green thing, a science thing, a thing for government apparatchiks and techy types to sort.
But still, why is this so? Why, seven years on, are Catholics not at the front and centre of a mass social movement demanding change? Was it because we all feel clubbed into despair by the sheer relentlessness of it all – the statistics, the images, the news? After the press conference, I decided that, however well made it was, unless The Letter could get at that question, and deal with it without leaving us all feeling more clubbed, it would make little difference. Full disclosure: I was interviewed for an early iteration of the film. The original idea was for a kind of Before the Flood, but with the Pope instead of Leonardo DiCaprio. A talented film-maker with award-winning documentaries behind him, Nicolas Brown – best-known for My Octopus Teacher – came with his Off the Fence production team to my small farm in July 2021, in the hiatus between Covid outbreaks, to quiz me about the encyclical’s genesis and to take video footage of me among sheep and tomatoes. A “not religious but spiritual” type, who grew up conservative evangelical in Colorado, he had switched his faith to science, but Laudato Si’ had blown up the wall between the two, and he was amazed by it.
The film he wanted to make was about how science and faith needed each other, how this was a moral matter that science alone could not solve. His task was to bring them together, show how the Pope had game-changed the conversation, and that’s what he wanted me to talk about. But that film never made it – too little plot – and while reeling from Covid and financial crises, Brown ended up recasting it. Four years in the making, The Letter has become the story of five characters from the peripheries, deeply impacted by climate change but far from the power centres of decision-making, who are invited to Rome for a dialogue with Pope Francis.
The missive of the film’s title is, obviously, the encyclical, but also the invitation letters (extravagantly wax-sealed by the Vatican postal service) sent by Czerny’s dicastery to the five protagonists in Senegal, India, Brazil and the US, who open them with amazed delight. Arouna Kandé, a refugee from the lowest-lying country in Africa, brings the voice of the poor; Ridhima Pandey, a climate activist from Uttarakhand in north India, brings the voice of the young; Odair “Dadá” Borari, chief general of the Maró Indigenous Territory in Pará (Brazil), brings the voice of the Indigenous; while Greg Asner and his wife Robin Martin, pioneers of technology able to map the loss of underwater biodiversity, bring the voice of Creation itself.
As we get to know them, on their way to Rome, we learn that climate change is not so much an issue as a human drama, a story of displacement and exile under the impact of extractive, soulless money-making. Laudato Si’ talks of the simultaneous cry of the earth and the cry of the poor; The Letter lets you hear it, see it, touch it.
Before the screening, the Vatican’s chief diplomat, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, spoke of “dark and forbidding shadows all around us”, when the search for an integral ecology risks being eclipsed by the fraying of multilateralism and “our inability to seek authentic dialogue and consensus”. But there was hope in this film, he said: in the dialogue that it makes possible. The room where, in the film, Lorna Gold takes the four to see the Pope was in the same Paul VI Audience complex as the synod hall where we were watching it. (I had been to the same room only a few days earlier, meeting the Pope with the synod synthesis team.)
After greeting them, Francis tells a familiar story – based on a twelfth-century midrash – about the building of the Tower of Babel: how if a valuable brick fell, the worker responsible would be severely beaten, but if a worker fell, he was just replaced and everyone carried on. This was the key to what was happening now, he told them. The “tower of human arrogance” being built with bricks of power requires people to work like slaves, who when they fall are forgotten. But we’ve gone one step further, he said; for now, “if nature falls, nothing happens.” He went on to speak of the arrogance of the power of the few who “use everything: they use people, they use nature, use everything and destroy it” and said that in the droughts, floods and earthquakes, nature was starting to complain, to scream: “Stop! ... Stop!”
As Brown captures him, the Pope is literally, at that moment, letting loose the cry of the earth. Meeting Francis would conventionally be the climax of the film but in The Letter it isn’t. The true drama happens later, when the five plus Gold go to Assisi to reflect on the experience. The Umbrian town is where the moral vision of Laudato Si’ gets expressed, and the road out of the crisis finds its signpost. That vision is articulated by the Pope’s white-bearded preacher, Franciscan friar Raniero Cantalamessa, who reads from the original manuscript of St Francis’ 1226 Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon and speaks of seeing the gift of Creation, of possessing nothing but enjoying everything – the opposite pole of the extractive paradigm of the modern world. But Assisi is also where the five protagonists plus Gold come together as a kind of family.
The shift is triggered by Arouna Kandé getting a message that his town is again under water, and that a friend has died making a dangerous crossing to Europe. The pain of it all surfaces; there are tears and hugs – and the audience is drawn into the human circle the six of them form. It turned out that the true meeting that had to take place was not with the Pope, but with each other. Somehow – the remainder of the film suggests it without ever voicing it – that encounter in Assisi born of shared vulnerability becomes the place of grace and new hope.
The film’s final screen quotes Laudato Si’: “There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself.” At the press conference that morning, Brown said the film had been an exercise of “getting outside our bubbles” and “meeting each other across the planet”. After the lights came up, Greg Asner, the scientist who had said in the film that his perspective had been transformed, was emotional. “The boundaries have dissolved,” he told us. “Don’t look to the scientists to fix this. It’s all of you. It’s every person we need.”
The young Indian activist, Ridhima Pandey, who has had nightmares her whole life about what was happening to the earth, had come to see that another kind of development was necessary: “We have to develop ourselves as well,” and “it has to come from the inside”. Gold put it best, describing what happened in Assisi. “We allowed our hearts to break. And maybe that’s what’s needed now: to experience that broken-heartedness for ourselves and for our planet, but then to pick ourselves up and to say: this isn’t the end, we need to act now.” She hopes that The Letter will be shown at community-organised screenings: in parishes and schools and other places. And that afterwards, a dialogue can take place, one that breaks us out of our bubbles and brings us together in common purpose. It’s simple, really. The resistance to Laudato Si’ is in the human heart, in our arrogance. Hearts first must break so we can confess what we have done and find another way to be. We’ve had a letter. Maybe we need to open it.
Austen Ivereigh is a fellow in contemporary church history at Campion Hall, University of Oxford. He is the author of Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and his Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (Henry Holt); and, with Pope Francis, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (Simon & Schuster). The Letter is available free on YouTube.