Laudate Deum & The Ten Green Commandments
A Call to Ecological Conversion
Fr. Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam, SDB
Laudate Deum
“Praise God for all his creatures” — Pope Francis
Issued on October 4, 2023 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi), Laudate Deum is Pope Francis’s urgent apostolic exhortation on the climate crisis. It serves as a powerful follow-up to Laudato Si’, warning that the world is nearing a breaking point and calling for immediate spiritual, political, and personal conversion.
Key Messages:
- The climate crisis is a “tragic and striking example of structural sin.”
- The technocratic paradigm treats nature as a resource to exploit.
- We need binding international commitments, a rapid energy transition, and a profound change of heart.
Fr. Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam, SDB
Rev. Dr. Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam is one of the Church’s leading voices on integral ecology.
He serves as Chair of Philosophy of Science and Director of the Institute of Social and Political Sciences at the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome. He previously coordinated the Sector on Ecology and Creation at the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
Fr. Kureethadam’s scholarship connects the Vatican, Oxford (Laudato Si’ Research Institute), and Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. His work helps translate papal teaching into practical action for the care of our common home.
The Ten Green Commandments of Laudato Si’
(Available in over 40 languages)
SEE
- 1. Take care of our common home in peril. God loves creation — and love is an active verb.
- 2. Listen to the cry of the poor who are the disproportionate victims of the crisis of our common home. The ecological crisis is a deeply moral one.
JUDGE
- 3. Rediscover a theological vision of the natural world as good news (gospel).
- 4. Recognize that the abuse of creation is ecological sin. The destruction of our common home calls for repentance.
- 5. Acknowledge the deeper human roots of the crisis of our common home.
ACT
- 6. Develop an integral ecology, as we are all interrelated and interdependent.
- 7. Learn a new way of dwelling in our common home and manage it more responsibly through a new economics and a new political culture.
- 8. Educate toward ecological citizenship through change of lifestyles.
- 9. Embrace an ecological spirituality that leads to communion with all creatures.
- 10. Care for our common home by cultivating the ecological virtues of praise, gratitude, care, justice, work, sobriety, and humility.