Catholic Environmentalism: Green teachings, initiatives take hold among Catholics worldwide

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-- CNS/Reuters/Romeo Ranoco: Catholic nuns plant trees during a program marking World Environment Day in Manila, Philippines, June 5, 2007.On his recent swing Down Under, Pope Benedict XVI garnered headlines for drawing a half-million pumped-up young Catholics to World Youth Day as well as for his latest bout of candor on the church’s sexual abuse crisis. Less noted was an important bit of subtext: the pope’s repeated calls for environmental protection.

In fact, environmentalism has emerged as perhaps the most distinctive new feature of Benedict XVI’s social teaching.

Benedict touched upon the environment seven times during his July 12-21 trip to Australia, more often than he mentioned sexual abuse, the right to life, relativism, or any other social or cultural concern.

This was hardly the first time a pope has struck an ecological note. As far back as 1972, Pope Paul VI called for “respect for the biosphere” to preserve “a hospitable earth for future generations.” Sacred Heart Sr. Marjorie Keenan, a longtime official of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said her shelves contain four volumes of papal teaching on the environment spanning four decades.

Nor was Benedict’s oratory particularly dramatic. This was not John Paul II in 2001, calling the world to “ecological conversion” in order to head off “catastrophe.” Instead, Benedict’s references were brief and never groundbreaking.

In retrospect, however, it’s that very ordinariness that seems remarkable. Benedict simply took for granted that his audience would recognize the environment as an object of legitimate Christian interest.

What the matter-of-fact tone reveals, in other words, is the extent to which Catholicism has “gone green.”

Walt Grazer, former head of the Environmental Justice Program for the U.S. bishops, said the change in Catholic attitudes has been dramatic.

“When I started in 1993, I was pretty lonely,” he said. “No one else worldwide seemed to be doing anything, so I knew pretty much everything that was going on.” Today, Grazer said, there’s such a blizzard of activism that no one can keep track of it all.

-- CNS/UCAN: Newly installed Archbishop Leo Cornelio of Bhopal plants one of 10,000 tree saplings he received as gifts in Madhya Pradesh in central India Sept. 18, 2007.According to those who know the terrain, this environmental push is not primarily the result of ecclesiastical forces, but the realities of the surrounding world, especially growing scientific insights about the link between human activity and the environment. The push is expressing itself, they say, in a classically Catholic double pincer: top-down leadership intersecting with bottom-up energy.

These two forces aren’t always in sync, but something has shifted. Much as liberation theology’s “option for the poor” went from being perceived as avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s to being seen today, as Benedict XVI recently put it in Brazil, as “an intrinsic requirement of the Gospel,” so ecology has moved to the center of Catholicism’s social concern.

At a September 2007 Mass in Loreto, Italy, marking the celebration of Earth Day, the pope issued a forceful ecological appeal.

“Before it’s too late, we need to make courageous choices that will recreate a strong alliance between man and Earth,” he said. “We need a decisive ‘yes’ to care for creation and a strong commitment to reverse those trends that risk making the situation of decay irreversible.”

Benedict’s approach certainly is not that of Greenpeace. In his message for the 2008 World Day of Peace, he pointedly warned that policy must be crafted free of “ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions,” and in Australia he said it’s not the church’s role to address the “technical questions which politicians and specialists have to resolve.”

Spiritual shift

Instead, Benedict sees environmentalism as part of a deeper spiritual shift away from what he called in Australia the “folly of consumerism,” toward a lifestyle rooted in the traditional virtues of self-sacrifice and solidarity. The pope also sees care for the earth as part of a continuum of moral truths, including defense of human life and dignity.

Jesuit Fr. Keith Pecklers of Rome’s Gregorian University said that Benedict is aware that appreciation for nature as the “book of creation” was a leitmotif of the early church. In that sense, Benedict’s ecology is less a matter of aggiornamento than ressourcement -- not an innovation but a return to the sources.

Whatever his point of entry, Benedict has been willing to put his money where his mouth is.

For example, he’s authorized the installation of more than 1,000 solar panels atop the Vatican’s Paul VI audience hall to provide electrical current, light, and heating and cooling. The Vatican has also inked an agreement to become the first “carbon-neutral” state in Europe. Under a pact with Planktos/KlimaFa, an eco-restoration company, a “Vatican Climate Forest” in Hungary’s Bükk National Park is being planted with enough new trees to offset the Vatican’s annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Of course, popes and their lieutenants have not always been in the ecological vanguard. Sr. Carole Shinnick, executive director of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, recalled a meeting in Rome some years ago when leaders of women’s orders met with a senior Vatican official and discussed their environmental efforts.

His response?

“It’s all well and good to talk about dogs and flowers,” Shinnick laughingly recalled this official saying, “but what about the essence of religious life?”

On list of ‘mortal sins’

While that resistance has not entirely melted away, Shinnick noted the irony that today the Vatican has even included environmental pollution on an updated list of “mortal sins” -- one measure, she said, of how times have changed.

The Vatican, by the way, hardly has a monopoly on ecological gestures. The patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, has been dubbed the “Green Patriarch” because of his environmental leadership, including boat tours down the Danube and the Amazon that he has taken with the media to highlight water conservation. The bishops of the Church of England have adopted limits on the miles they log in the air; when the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, visited Benedict XVI last May, he arrived by train because he had already used up his allotment of air travel.

Around the world, church leaders are embracing the environmental cause.

In Brazil, Catholic bishops have been ardent defenders of the Amazon rain forest. Archbishop Orani João Tempesta of Belém do Pará, Brazil, speaking on behalf of the bishops’ conference, proclaimed in February 2007 that “the church is not against development, but it opposes development that deprives populations of their future.” Such commitment has won the respect of secular environmentalists; an October 2007 piece in the magazine of the Sierra Club, titled “Padre Power,” documents the efforts of Catholic clergy in Latin America to defend the environment against powerful multinational corporations.

In the Philippines, the bishops’ conference has proposed a national water conservation program, including a ban on sand and gravel extraction to stop water losses due to quarrying, and granting land tenure to occupants of watersheds to give them a stake in preserving the water supply. The alternative, the bishops warned, is spreading “hydrological poverty.”

The Catholic bishops of the Pacific Northwest in the United States and Canada issued a joint pastoral letter in 2000 arguing for conservation of the Columbia River Watershed. Based on the idea of creation as the “book of nature,” the bishops call for greater protection of wildlife, indigenous communities, and the entire ecosystem formed by the watershed.

In various ways, Catholics are translating ideals into practice.

Consider St. Joan of Arc Parish in Minneapolis, which recently renovated its parish center. The parish reused or recycled 80 percent of the materials from the old structure. Builders used wood products from sustainable forests, cork flooring from oak tree bark, office chairs made from recycled milk jugs, and windowsills made from soybeans, junk mail and recycled newspapers.

Or take St. Gabriel of the Sorrowful Virgin Parish in the north end of Toronto, where ecological commitment is literally written in the walls. Instead of stained-glass windows inside the church, a heat-saving clear thermal-glass window looks out onto a garden -- connecting the congregation, designers say, with a small sliver of God’s creation.

“We did this to make a statement,” said Fr. Paul Cusak, the pastor. A member of the Passionist order, he said the redesign was influenced by eco-theologian Fr. Thomas Berry, also a Passionist.

“We’re in a pivotal moment in our 15 billion-year history,” Cusak said.

By all accounts, women’s orders have been in the forefront of these efforts. Shinnick, a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, said women’s communities were primed to lead the way.

“We had the property,” she said. “We had large tracts of land, we had buildings that needed refurbishing, and we were wondering what to do.”

-- CNS photo/Karen Callaway: Paul Bernadette Bounk, a Sister of St. Joseph, and Julie Pavuk flush a catheter on Giselle, a sick alpaca at White Violet Farm at St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Ind., Oct. 5, 2006.One oft-cited example is the White Violet Center for Eco-Justice, run by the Sisters of Providence outside Terre Haute, Ind. With more than 1,000 acres owned by the order, the sisters stopped the use of pesticides and herbicides on their croplands, so their produce is now organically certified, and had their forests classified as protected territory.

The center features an organic orchard, an alpaca herd that produces natural fiber, and several models of sustainable housing built from straw bales. It conducts education programs that, among other things, reach some 2,000 to 3,000 schoolchildren every year, according to Providence Sr. Ann Sullivan, the center’s director.

This “green wave” is reaching down into daily life in a surprising variety of ways. Pecklers, who teaches liturgy at the Gregorian University, says liturgists these days are emphasizing the use of “natural symbols,” such as unprocessed bread, oil and wine in the sacraments.

“The symbols communicate something about the deeper value we assign to the environment and to the planet,” Pecklers said.

Unfinished business

Yet the “greening” of Catholicism is far from uncontroversial.

For one thing, some prominent Catholics aren’t convinced of the science underlying the environmental movement, and they wonder if ecological advocacy strays from the church’s religious mission. A reminder flared up in Australia, where the pope’s official host, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, declared himself “a bit of a skeptic” on climate change. A year ago, Pell made waves with a newspaper column in which he acidly observed that Jesus had nothing to say about global warming.

More deeply, Catholicism remains divided over the theological basis for its growing environmental concern. In many ways, observers say, it’s a classic case of the church’s practice running ahead of theological reflection -- a pattern familiar from the birth of mendicant orders in the 13th century, to the growth of ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue in the 20th.

The modern point of departure for eco-theology was French Jesuit Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955. Teilhard regarded evolution as a process of “Christogenesis” embracing the entire cosmos, which seemed uncomfortably close to pantheism for some church officials. In 1962 the Vatican censured Teilhard’s work, and in 1981, on the 100th anniversary of Teilhard’s birth, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reaffirmed that judgment.

Philosophical descendants of Teilhard today include figures such as Berry and Irish Fr. Diarmuid O’Murchu, as well as Rosemary Radford Ruether, former Dominican Matthew Fox, and physicist Brian Swimme. Though each has a distinct outlook, they share a sense that Catholic teaching needs a serious overhaul. In 1992, Berry said: “We should put the Bible away for 20 years while we radically rethink our religious ideas.”

One fault line concerns the allegedly “anthropocentric” character of official Christian doctrine, meaning, according to critics, that it privileges humanity and obscures the moral status of nature. Guardians of orthodoxy warn that such arguments inevitably lead to one of two outcomes:

* The position of utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who denies a special status to human beings and asserts that views to the contrary amount to “speciesism”;

* Ascribing divinity to nature, meaning pantheism or one of its variants -- “panentheism,” “immanentism” and so on.

Aware of those dangers, official Catholic teaching treats the spiritual and moral primacy of humanity as essential. At the close of a Vatican-sponsored conference on climate change in April 2007, Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, asserted that the human person has an “unarguable superiority” over the rest of creation by virtue of possessing an immortal soul.

Given this contrast, the short-term forecast in Catholicism would seem to call for a growing consensus on ecological practice, but sharp divisions on theory. For those convinced of a looming “catastrophe,” to use John Paul’s language, the question is whether that’s enough.

“Some days I’m optimistic, and others I’m not,” said Dominican Sr. Miriam Therese MacGillis, founder of the eco-sensitive Genesis Farm in New Jersey. “Basically, I’m deeply committed to hope.”

-- CNS/Courtesy of Vatican’s technical services department: A computer-generated rendition shows what the giant rooftop garden of solar panels will look like on the Vatican’s Paul VI audience hall.In the long run, MacGillis argued that Catholicism will have to embrace a “new cosmology,” one that sees the universe as alive and spiritually charged. The older view of humans walking on an “inert, dead planet” doesn’t hold up, she said, against new scientific understandings such as quantum physics. “You can’t solve new problems with an old theology,” MacGillis said, “any more than you can use the scriptures to fix your computer.”

Nothing Benedict XVI said in Australia bears on this debate, and given his own theological proclivities, it’s likely his sympathies run to those voicing caution. Yet whatever his underlying logic, few global figures today are making stronger environmental appeals, and virtually none are pushing beyond policy debates to insist upon personal sacrifices and changes in lifestyle, linking that message to a critique of the cult of consumption. In turn, as Pecklers puts it, Benedict’s engagement provides support for voices in the church who in the past may have felt “dismissed too quickly.”

That may not amount to a cosmological revolution, but it’s at least a deeper shade of green -- a transformation, to judge by today’s ferment, that promises to define the cutting edge of Catholic thought and practice for some time to come.

John L. Allen Jr. is NCR senior correspondent. His e-mail address is jallen@ncronline.org.

National Catholic Reporter August 1, 2008