Page 31 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

fertile land, water, minerals and so on are intended to satisfy the needs of all
humankind, from one generation to the next.

The “Laudato Si” encyclical about the care of our common home - in
other words on ecology - is actually nourished by the great principles of the
Churches’ social doctrine. Among them, besides the principle of the common
good, in this case, the principle of the universal destination of all the goods in
this world is particularly relevant.

John Paul II, at the centennial commemoration of Rerum Novarum, cele-
brated in 1991, chose the theme of the universal destination of all the goods.

According to Saint John Paul II, that principle required a rethinking and a
realization on two important issues: the first was that not only material goods, like
the resources from underground or the land, have a common destination, but
also intellectual goods, like the results of research, entrepreneurial and economic
“know-how”, science, art: today they would be called non material goods. The
second issue was that the universal destination of goods required international
and intergenerational solidarity so that each generation can leave to their children
a planet that can be inhabited by humankind. Inhabitable doesn’t only have an
environmental natural meaning but also an environmental humanitarian one.

After as long as 25 years, Pope Francis’s “Laudato Si” takes up these issues
again and he brings them to completion. The care of our common home requires
wisdom. It needs us to put together, with prudence, science and technology, eco-
nomy and production. In other words, it needs us to think of knowledge and
nature, human values and natural resources as things to be shared, because they
are destined to all. In “Laudato Si” this intertwining of human and natural, spi-
ritual and material elements is very evident and demanding; it’s summarized in the
concept of integral ecology, through which Pope Francis inherits and revises
John Paul the second’s concept of human ecology. Integral ecology requires the
combination of knowledge with the laws of nature, but also a moral and religious
approach towards creation. There is an order in things, the fruit of our creator’s
knowledge and love, which speaks to us. For example, in “Laudato Si”, Pope
Francis speaks repeatedly of the people who are excluded from life, of those who
are discarded, from human embryos to the elderly, who are pushed to exit life
through a “sweet death”. Moreover Pope Francis strengthens all this, maintaining

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