Your guess is as good as mine as to just how widely read other papal documents had been and just how widely read Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical has been. But I think that Ivereigh is just making an impressionistic statement for dramatic effect. However, Pope Francis' 2015 document has been widely read.
In any event, in Ong's 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture, mentioned above, he uses the shortened word "Romance" in the title to refer to Romanticism in Western cultural history, as noted above. Moreover, he discusses with approval Renato Poggioli's 1962 book in Italian The Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968).
Ong says, "The late Renato Poggioli has suggested that for the entire foreseeable future all serious developments in literature and art, and it would seem in life styles generally, will oscillate back and forth between one and another form of romantic alienation. . . . All this hints that we have not yet plumbed the depths of the otherness which romanticism was and is" (page 256).
Taking a hint from what Ong says, perhaps we can characterize Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical as plumbing the depths of the otherness which romanticism was and is, but in the context of the philosophical and theological social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
In Ivereigh's recent Commonweal article, he says, "In a 1989 lecture at the Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires on the need for a new political anthropology [in Roman Catholic theology], Bergoglio quoted the books [by Guardini, The End of the Modern World (1950) and Power and Responsibility (1951)], describing Guardini as 'the prophet of post-modernity' for identifying how the rapid development of technology over two hundred years, accelerated by globalization, had brought humanity to a fork in the road of history. Guardini's thesis was the key not just to the narrative of Laudato si', which regularly quotes The End of the Modern World, but also to how Francis saw the encyclical's purpose: to help humanity grasp that the choice was annihilation or conversion [to integral ecology, as Pope Francis operationally defines and explains this key concept in his comprehensive 2015 eco-encyclical]."
The word "integral" is frequently used in Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical to modify another term, presumably to disambiguate the other term's possible meaning and thereby make the term more carefully nuanced. In the case of the two-words "integral ecology," this term includes what most people would think of as "ecology" but now integrated with the philosophical and theological "human ecology" advanced previously by Pope Benedict XVI.
The word "conversion" is used by the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) in his 1957 philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th ed., edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran as volume three of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto, Ontario; Buffalo, New York; London, England: University of Toronto Press, 1992), where he discusses intellectual conversion, moral conversion, and religious conversion. Pope John-Paul II had previous referred to an "ecological conversion."
Now, Guardini articulated his critique of technology and power in his 1950 and his 1951 books in German at roughly the same time when Pope Pius XII (born in 1876; reigned 1939-1958) was celebrating technology in his various statements that the American priest Leo J. Haigerty has compiled in the book Pius XII and Technology, with a foreword by Walter J. Ong, S.J. (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1962; pages vii-x for Ong's foreword). So was Pope Pius XII just superficial and perhaps naà ¯ve in his celebration of technology? Or was Guardini just more perceptive than the pope was?
Now, if we were to imagine a spectrum of views about technology with techno-phobes at one extreme end of the spectrum and techno-philes at the other end, with a mid-point between the two extremes, then Guardini and Pope Francis would be on the techno-phobe side of the mid-point, and Pope Pius XII and Ong would be on the technophile side of the mid-point. Indeed, technology is one of the most persistent themes in Ong's 400 or so publications. For example, see his 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture, mentioned above, and his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen).
Also see Ong's essay "Technology Outside Us and Inside Us" in the journal Communio: International Catholic Review, volume 5, number 2 (Summer 1978): pages 100-121. It is reprinted in volume one of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992a, pages 189-208).
For complete bibliographic information about Ong's 400 or so publications, see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2011, pages 185-245). This book was published in the Media Ecology Series published by Hampton Press as were three books I had a hand in writing or editing: (1) Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (2000; 2nd ed., 2015); (2) An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (2002); and (3) Of Ong and Media Ecology, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (2012).
In Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical, he has further extrapolated Guardini's philosophical and theological points in his two books in the 1950s. In any event, the pope's extrapolations from Guardini's points make his 2015 eco-encyclical sound similar in spirit to the late American Jewish cultural critic Neil Postman's 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Knopf). But Postman's most widely known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985).
For years, I used Postman's 1992 book as one of the required textbooks in an introductory-level course I taught on Literacy, Technology and Society at the University of Minnesota Duluth along with Ong's 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, so that I could offer the students both a techno-phobe (Postman) and a techno-phile (Ong) view of technology.
Had Pope Bergoglio been reading Ong at least as carefully as he read Guardini over the years, starting when he was a Jesuit novice, then he might not sound like such a techno-phobe today. Unfortunately, for most of Ong's fellow Roman Catholics, his body of work stands as the road not taken.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
