Pray with the Pope: Everything is interconnected

by Chris Chatteris SJ · September 4, 2025

Intention: Let us pray that, inspired by St Francis, we might experience our interdependence with all creatures who are loved by God and worthy of love and respect.

Sometimes I wonder if our difficulty in recognising our interdependence with all creatures isn’t partly caused by our contemporary difficulty in recognising our interdependence with our fellow human beings.

I am referring to an exaggerated individualism which can’t abide the Franciscan idea that we are fundamentally communal in nature and therefore we need one another.

Every time I turn on a light or make a phone call, I am dependent on a whole army of unseen people who make these things possible. Because our modern world is so intertwined, we modern people are actually more interdependent than humans have ever been. Ironically and idiotically, modern “rugged individualism” denies this.

So, while we kid ourselves that we are independent of our fellow human beings, we simultaneously insulate ourselves psychologically from all the other creatures on the planet. And yet, every time I take a breath of air, I am totally dependent on plants and trees for the oxygen that I need just to stay alive. That is before I even consider the plants and animals I depend on for food and drink.

Hunter-gatherers understood these things. They knew that they depended on the eland for life and on one another to track down the creatures that were the source of their nourishment. We can look down our noses on the animist religion of our hunter-gathering forebears as being simple and primitive, but by regarding all things as being possessed of a spirit and being interconnected, they saw themselves as part of the web of life, not as something above and independent of it, as we tend to do.

Economics of creation

What most modern people do understand is that we are dependent on the economy. However, what we often fail to grasp is that the economy is totally dependent on the natural environment. Without natural resources, without water, wood, minerals, animals, plants and energy there would be no economy.

Unfortunately, we imagine that the economy equals money. It doesn’t! Money is used to buy goods and services, both of which originate from natural resources and created beings. And it doesn’t matter whether you believe creation is of God or can be explained without God — it is still an interdependent, living system.

The restoration of an awareness of all this is obviously the task of education. We need to teach our children a systems-understanding of the world.

We also need our governments to regulate those consumerist forces which would blind and distract us from these vital truths, for without a truthful vision of our world we will be unable to treat it wisely. Erroneous economic and ecological ideas lead to bad and even fatal ecological practices.

Seeking the truth and seeking to live the truth are essential for all aspects of human life — including the challenge of living in harmony and interdependence with all of God’s creatures, as the pope’s intention calls us to.