Laudato Si’: Reflections on Pope Francis and the Environment

Thomas J. Reese, SJ

Senior Analyst
National Catholic Reporter

In his encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis reflects on what science and theology can tell us about our responsibility for our common home and how politics and economics is getting in the way of our fulfilling that responsibility. He calls us to radical changes in our life style, economics, and spirituality.

Father Thomas J. Reese was educated at St. Louis University, the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and at the University of California Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in political science. He worked in Washington as a writer and lobbyist for tax reform from 1975 to 1978. He was an associate editor of America magazine, where he wrote on politics, economics and the Catholic Church, from 1978 to 1985 and editor-in-chief from 1998 to 2005. He was a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center from 1985 to 1998 and 2006 to 2013. 

His trilogy on the organization and politics of the church includes: Archbishop: Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church (1989), A Flock of Shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops (1992), and Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church (1996).In 2014, Father Reese was appointed by President Obama to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission that reviews the facts and circumstances of religious freedom violations and makes policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress.

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