As long as we’re renovating our homes, let’s also fix up society

The stock market price of The Home Depot has rocketed to an all-time high. Stuck in place during the pandemic, many are working on their home and yard.

But the pandemic also requires spiritual renovations. Accordingly, Pope Francis has launched a new series of talks for his Wednesday General Audiences aimed at reconnecting us with the Church’s social doctrine.

COVID-19 shows how vulnerable and interconnected we are. This interconnectivity can amplify and spread healing, or amplify and exacerbate illness.

We can start by laying aside the malign disinformation on the internet that seeks to amplify disagreement among the poor.

This divide-and-conquer political strategy is pushed by the very rich, who use it to grab more power and wealth under the cover of chaos, conflict, and emergencies.

It is a good thing to spend less time on screens, not more. Tend to a garden instead. Or beautify your home with incremental improvements. Fix whatever is broken.

But the rapid increase in profits for the corporations that sell you your supplies is perhaps a sign of something out of joint.

It’s not intrinsically wrong to achieve profit growth during a pandemic. Yet perhaps it is a sign of a larger societal problem: why do only a few people grow dramatically richer during the chaos, while so many others suffer and are ignored?

Think of all the elderly who have effectively been abandoned and left to die during this time. Our society seems more concerned with fuelling economic growth than with caring for the sick and aged.

The Pope begins his new series of talks on August 5 by asking us to consider how we may fix things beyond our individual homes. How can we help to heal the world?

It is our social ills, he notes, that the pandemic has highlighted, yet “our Catholic social tradition can help the human family heal this world that suffers from serious illnesses.”

His second talk on August 12 highlights the distorted view of human persons that infects our culture. This is the view that denies human dignity, promoting instead “an individualistic and aggressive throw-away culture, which transforms the human being into a consumer good.”

“We are social beings,” says the Pope, “We need to live in this social harmony, but when there is selfishness, our outlook does not reach others, the community, but focuses on ourselves, and this makes us ugly, nasty and selfish, destroying harmony.”

Our society’s ingrained selfishness is exposed by the pandemic. Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers and pandemic conspiracy theorists illustrate the toxic obsessions of an individualistic mindset.

The Pope identifies lack of concern for others as the “indifference that accompanies the throwaway culture.”

Encouraging us in our spiritual renewal, Francis insists that healing our society is a mandatory task for people of faith: “Faith always requires that we let ourselves be healed and converted from our individualism, whether personal or collective,” he says.

The Pope’s weekly talks offer us a good starting point for healing and renewal in this time of COVID-19. We need spiritual inspiration for overcoming individualistic indifference and the mindset of throwaway culture. Francis gives many concrete examples from Scripture to illustrate his points, and I find them to be well chosen, effective, and very moving.

There are even shorter summaries on the Vatican website of his already short talks. You can start by reading the shortest version (the summary at the bottom of the page for each talk) and then dive into the full talk, to contemplate it slowly, now that you know what its main points will be.

You can then especially savour the biblical examples, which transport the Pope’s main points beyond the status of mere platitudes, deep into the realm of the actual lived experiences of faith, hope, and love.

In addition to Francis, there are other resources I can recommend. Charles Camosy has an excellent book, Resisting Throwaway Culture: How a Consistent Life Ethic Can Unite a Fractured People, that takes its inspiration from Pope Francis’ teaching.

Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World addresses the root societal problem: the delusion that our society needs unending economic growth.

Don’t be misled by the publisher’s obnoxious subtitle. The Pope offers a real theology of salvation. But Hickel challenges us to rethink an economy conceived according to a throwaway mindset.

Our throwaway culture is simply unsustainable given the global crisis of ecological collapse and the deadly viruses created by our environmental exploitation.

The stock market prices of big corporations (now getting bigger as the pandemic kills off the smaller) need not always increase. Especially if we stop consuming our planet’s resources so wastefully. 

If we learn how to take less, we can become more human.