Catholics enlarging social justice to ecological limits: a new paradigm emerging?

In 1967, Lynn White published the article "The historical roots of our ecological crisis" in the journal Science, accusing Christianity of being the cause of our environmental woes. This controversy was first fueled by numerous writings while a growing mobilization of religious actors on environmental issues has been noticed nowadays. We will focus on one of it, led by the Social Action and Research Center, founded and directed by Jesuits (a catholic religious order). This latter initiated in 2011 a process of reflection with its partners - academics, entrepreneurs, NGOs - on the social justice aspects of an energy transition. This initiative sparked a long work to draw – on both theoretical and practical aspects – the linkages between the concept of environmental limits and the issue of social inequalities, resulting in the gradual construction of a new social justice frame, enlarged to physical constraints. Studied since two years through a participant observation (Becker, 2002) and comprehensive interviews (Kaufmann, 1996), we propose an analysis - both in terms of theoretical propositions and mobilization logics - of this politicization process (Lagroye, 2003) that led to an ecological justice framing. Within a perspective of history of ideas, we will first describe the different stages that led to reframe social justice claims into ecological demands. Our daily contact, on the long term, allowed us to observe the changes from a discourse targeting first the unequal social impacts of energy transition policies to a convergence between social inequalities and ecological limits. In a second part, we will highlight the fact that this process of acculturation depends on the socio-political identity of the studied actors. In fact, the Ceras can be related to a “reformist nebula” (C.Topalov, 1999), producing and spreading ideas within different types of networks to create a reformist common sense through debates. Moreover, the Center was born in 1903 in order to support the emerging "social thinking" of the Church, institutionalized by a corpus of texts from the Catholic magisterium, promoting social justice. The demonstration of interactions between ecological constraints and social inequalities gave a meaning and a legitimacy for the Center to tackle ecological issues. The last encyclical, Laudato Si’, even strengthened theological justifications to be concerned with environmental issues for catholics. Eventually, we will discuss the theoretical contribution of this emerging paradigm of what we call a “relational justice”, depicting its distinction from environmental justice framework, its similarities to ecological justice such as defined by D.Schlosberg, and the way it dialogues with environmental ethics such as ecocentrism.