Caring for Our Common Home: 'Écologie Intégrale' as Political Theology among French Catholics

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of ‘integral ecology’, a new paradigm of Catholic political theology, through an ethnography of Les Alternatives Catholiques, a prominent Lyon-based association of lay Catholic intellectuals. A cornerstone of Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, the term ‘integral ecology’ indexes the synergy between climate change and global socioeconomic inequality, suggesting that ‘all is connected’. Drawing on Laudato Si’, Les AlterCathos host conferences on political participation and green conversion, and run a café as a microcosm for their advocacy of a holistic, environmental and human ‘Common Good’. This case study of public Catholic praxis in secular Republican France brings into conversation the concerns of three anthropological traditions, which have respectively addressed Catholic lives, the ethical self- formation of religious actors, and the presence of religion in modern public spheres. Intended as a positive counterpart to the anthropological work on pious religiosity, this thesis aims to take seriously the ‘worldly’ commitments of religious institutions and actors, suggesting political theology as a locus of anthropological and ethnographic investigation. Ethnographies of Islam in France have exposed the uneasy place of religion in the secular Republic; here, I offer a parallel inquiry into French Catholicism. I demonstrate, firstly, that the place of Catholics in the French Republic is simultaneously central and marginal – both in their political participation in the public sphere, and in their cultural relationship with the sphere of education. I situate the rise of ‘integral ecology’ as an explicitly Catholic politics in the national aftermath of the 2012-2013 anti-same-sex-marriage and anti-surrogate-pregnancy protest ‘La Manif Pour Tous’, widely viewed by the public as a religious incursion into secular politics. This bioethical protest, predating Laudato Si’, ineluctably set the stage for all subsequent attempts by French Catholics to politically or discursively defend ‘Nature’ and ‘mankind’. It is in this equivocal context that the lay philosophers of Les Alternatives Catholiques articulate Laudato Si’ and the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church into political guidelines, through public conferences. I address the ways in which Les AlterCathos authoritatively spearhead a turn to Catholic environmentalism through the day-to-day running of their café and, by including lapsed Catholics and non-Catholics as participants, negotiate the place of belief and piety in their efforts. Finally, I argue that the praxis of integral ecology relies on the cultivation of subsidiarity – and show how this advocacy of small-scale, locally-situated lifestyles runs against two hurdles: the narratives of Republican commentators who fear a reactionary promotion of the (rural and Christian) ‘roots’ of France, and the discourses of segments of the Catholic population who do uphold just such an ‘integralist’ stance. This work offers a case study of lay Catholics’ efforts to combine religious, political, and philosophical epistemologies, and to position their praxis within and besides the institutions of the Catholic Church. Attending to the modes of subjectivation of this instance of political theology, the thesis endeavours to showcase the worldly modalities of ‘caring for Our Common Home’ as a political and spiritual project.