Ecological discourse in Pope Francis’ tweets

In 2015, the Holy Father relaunched Catholic ecological dis course in his encyclical letter Laudato sì. As a basis for the Catholic church’s renewed position aimed mainly at promoting « sustainable and integral development » (Bergoglio 2015, par. 13), the letter revisits the fig urative rationality (Greimas & Courtés 1979) characterizing Saint Francis’ Laudes Creaturarum (Canticle of the Sun). The poem defines as brother- and sisterhood the relationship between man and nature, man and the four elements, celestial bodies and meteorological phenomena, and takes these as its objects of praise together with Mother Earth. Pope Francis references the cosmology outlined in the first part of the poem, offering it to contemporary Catholics for consideration. How is this representation disseminated through social media? To answer this question, we will analyze a corpus of tweets marked with the hashtag #LaudatoSi in different languages to search for the global strate gies enacted by the Church. As we will show, many tweets associate this hashtag with the hashtag #Anthropocene, though this specific term does not appear in the encyclical letter. How do these notions of sustainable development and Anthropocene actualize Saint Francis’ poem? How do they renew Catholic subjectivity? To answer such questions, this study applies an innovative method from structural semantics to ecological tweets containing the hashtags #LaudatoSi, #sustainability, and #Anthropocene.