Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on the caring for environment, Laudato Si, has stimulated various responses from the Indonesian Catholic community. While these responses indicate how effective the Pope’s teaching has been, the present paper argued that Indonesian Catholics’ environmental movement could not exclusively be attributed to the issuance of the Laudato Si encyclical alone. By employing an historical method and utilizing several magazines published by Indonesian Catholic communities as data sources (Basis, Hidup, Praba, and Rohani), this paper examined the environmental discourses and activisms of the Indonesian Catholics from 1950s to 1990s. This article showed that since 1950s the Indonesian Catholics had developed a variety of environmental thinking by which they contested discourses and carried out a movement on environmental issues. The focus switched from the impact of wild animal huntings and disasters such as floods and landslides, to the threats that arose from industrialisation. The form of the movement also switched from criticism to activism and religious reflection. Despite these changes, there were several issues that continously received an attention, i.e. deforestation, industrial land use, and wastes. This paper concluded that the Indonesian Catholics’ movement during the period under study represented the process by which the Catholic Church was being “Indonesianized” and became situated in the realities of the Indonesian society. However, the movement mostly spread within the Catholic communities and were hence asymmetrical with the impact that the Catholics had expected to contribute to the country.
Agus Suwignyo is an associate professor in Indonesian history at the History Department, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Gadjah Mada University. He earned his doctorate degree from Leiden University (2012). His research interests include social and education history focusing on knowledge production, decolonization, citizenship and state formation.
