Beyond Laudato Si’: Women’s Voices, Gendered Experience, and Environmental Justice

The Lane Center’s 8th Annual event Honoring Women Who Shape CST

Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum have opened important conversations and movements in Catholic social and ecological teaching. Yet gendered realities, and women’s experiences in particular, are notably absent from both documents. This talk will explore the politics and problems of non-citation of women religious and women scholars; will note how women religious and women-led climate organizations have anticipated many themes of LS and LD; and will explain why the lack of attention to gendered effects of climate change hinders the analyses offered by Pope Francis in LS and LD. It will also lay out several straightforward steps that can be taken to address these omissions, while linking to persistent patterns and questions of androcentrism in the Church and societies more generally.