Documentary Highlights Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home
Pope Francis issued his encyclical letter, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home in 2015. Now a new feature-length documentary, The Letter: A Message for our Earth, movingly brings to life his transformative vision for a renewed earth and a renewed humanity. (You can watch the trailer here and the film can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.)
In The Letter, the Pope shares the screen with 5 environmental champions from around the world—the Amazon, India, Senegal, and Hawai’i – who travel to the Vatican at his invitation. They come from the front lines of the climate crisis. But such voices– of the Indigenous, the young, the poor, and those speaking on behalf of wildlife– are often ignored or marginalized in climate conversations.
While the film highlights their touching meeting with Pope Francis, the five also discover new hope for the planet in each other. These new relationships–spanning different worldviews, socioeconomic differences, and faith orientations—embody the Pope’s belief that “there can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself.”
Karen Delahunty, one of ICCT’s founding mothers, says The Letter “re-inspired” her.” Through the beauty and pain generated through sister moon, brother sun & all our relations, may we continue to mobilize and awaken hearts to the cry of the earth . . . to the cry of respecting life… Let us not lose heart and not give up.”
