Integral Ecology and Environmental Law in the Anthropocene. The Perspective of the Catholic Church

The authentic nexus between environment and religion has always been a crucial theme for the Catholic Church, as the Church’s social doctrine and its ecological vocation demonstrate. Recently, through the universal message of the Pope’s encyclical Laudato Si’, the Catholic Church started a dialogue with all the individuals (not only Catholic) for a new process expected at building an ecological dimension of human behaviors and the law. The chapter aims at highlight the effects of this new approach to global environmental law, mainly in producing an emerging right to climate that resides on the need to recover the discourse between humankind and God. In realizing this main task, the new Catholic perspective on environment represents the common ground to be sought in reducing the clash between the rule of law and the rule of God.