Sixth of seven parts
TODAY, Oct. 3, 2026, is the sixth anniversary of Fratelli Tutti (“On Fraternity and Social Friendship”). While Laudato Si’ provides the direct environmental framework for ecological debt, Fratelli Tutti supplies the necessary social and political framework. It takes the concept a step further by focusing on the relationships between peoples and nations. If Laudato Si’ is about our relationship with the land, Fratelli Tutti is about how we treat one another while managing that land.
Here, Pope Francis revisits a foundational concept in Catholic Social Teaching: the subordination of private property to the universal destination of earthly goods. He writes that the world belongs to everyone, and no group has the right to monopolize natural resources to the exclusion of others. While commercial loggers or foreign mining entities that strip the lands of Eastern Samar, my home province, may treat local resources as exclusive corporate property, Fratelli Tutti argues that extracting localized wealth to enrich global financial markets — while leaving the host community with a depleted ecology and ruined livelihoods — is a structural sin. It violates the fundamental principle that the Earth’s goods are meant to sustain all human beings, not just corporate shareholders.
A critique of ‘a world without borders’
The pope points out a bitter paradox of globalization: markets, investments and supply chains operate seamlessly across international borders, yet the vulnerable human beings impacted by these industries are often left isolated.
I’ve mentioned a few times how wealth extracted from the Samar provinces has built corporate empires elsewhere, while leaving the local population to bear the environmental risks. Fratelli Tutti frowns upon this imbalance. It notes that a “throwaway culture” lets financial capital and raw ores exit an island like Homonhon easily, while the local communities displaced or impoverished by extraction are left behind, trapped in a degraded habitat with no systemic safety net.
‘A better kind of politics?’
In Chapter 5 of the encyclical, the pope calls for an overhaul of the global economic framework, demanding “a better kind of politics” that is not subordinated to financial interests, but instead serves the common good and places human dignity at the center. This underpins my earlier observation that community-led, ridge-to-reef development strategies are marginalized because “that is not where the money is,” giving way instead to fragmented engineering fixes. The pope argues that true politics must protect long-term social futures over short-term financial gains. Short-term profit-seeking leaves an unpaid social and ecological deficit that localized flood control walls simply cannot remedy.
Universal fraternity means no one is an outsider
The heart of Fratelli Tutti is the parable of the Good Samaritan, framing universal brotherhood as an active duty to care for the wounded stranger on the side of the road. When large-scale mining operations create multigenerational ecological deficits, they treat residents as “existential outsiders” — collateral damage for global development. Fratelli Tutti asserts that we are all “in the same boat.” Therefore, an environmental atrocity committed against a community in a small Pacific island like Nauru, or an island community in Eastern Samar, is an injury to the shared dignity of the entire human family.
Laudato Si’ helps us examine the physical and ecological debt incurred by corporate plundering. Fratelli Tutti leads us to argue that this extraction is simultaneously a theological and social debt. It provides a basis for the notion that true ecological rehabilitation requires building a culture of encounter, solidarity and social friendship that values local human dignity far above global market forces.
Ecological interdependence
Leonardo Boff, the prominent Brazilian theologian and one of the early pioneers of Liberation Theology, said: The poor, the environment, economic systems, future generations and human responsibility become parts of one ecological question. If everything is interconnected, then humanity must discover a form of solidarity capable of embracing the whole human family.
Boff’s expanded moral circle suggests a progression that starts with human dignity and ends until human fraternity is achieved through human development, solidarity, responsibility and ecology. Reaching higher levels of outcomes is tougher, as my CBRMP experience shows, but the sequence of transformation involves, at the base, the human person, then society, then nations, globalization, the planet, and finally, humanity.
Debt, as we know it, means someone receives something, another party provides it, an obligation is created and repayment is expected.
Ecological debt complicates every part of that equation. Who is the debtor? The possibilities include wealthy nations, industrial civilization, corporations, consumers, present generations and humanity collectively.
Who is the creditor? They can be the poorer countries, Indigenous communities, future generations, other species, ecosystems and, ultimately, the living Earth.
What is owed? Not simply money, obviously. Here are the possibilities: a stable climate, clean air, clean water, biodiversity, resources, technological assistance, restoration, justice, a habitable future.
And then comes the question that truly matters: Can a civilization indefinitely consume ecological capital that belongs, in some sense, to people who have not yet been born?
The great accounting error
Quoting E.F. Schumacher in his book “Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered” (1973): Humanity may have mistaken liquidation for prosperity. Imagine a corporation reporting enormous profits while secretly selling its machinery, buildings and inventory to pay dividends. The books might look prosperous. The corporation would actually be consuming its capital.
Something analogous may happen when civilization counts production, consumption, GDP, exports, energy use, etc., while inadequately accounting for soil degradation, biodiversity loss, atmospheric pollution, depleted fisheries, deforestation, destroyed ecosystems, resource depletion and climate damage.
Conventional economics asks: How much did we produce?
Ecological accounting asks: What did we destroy in producing it?
Conventional economics asks: What do we own?
Ecological ethics asks: What did we merely inherit? And: What right does one generation have to consume the inheritance of another?
To be concluded on Oct. 10, 2026
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