Tree-hugging and Catholic

Some who were in Catholic schools in the 1950s recall being bused to theaters to see a Hollywood film about three children in 1917 Portugal who see a lovely lady in a cloud. Sisters anchored the rows, shushing us as the story unfolded.

In a climactic scene the vision “proves” her reality by causing the sun to gyrate overhead like a Texas baton twirl and approach the Earth, instantly drying the rain-soaked crowd and spooking the Snidely Whiplash-like communist magistrate who was there to suppress outbreaks of religiosity.

Women from those same orders today would be embarrassed by both the implausible astronomy and the misuse of so much solar energy solely for evangelization.

When Vatican roofs sport photovoltaic panels and the local parish center is retrofitted with window- sills made from recycled junk mail (see cover story), it’s just not your grandma’s Catholic church any- more.

It began with Jesuit Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the paleontologist who participated in the discovery of the 500,000-year-old Peking Man in the 1920s. A deeply religious scientist, his allegiance to both Christ and the scientific method impelled him to write books reconciling faith with evolution’s facts.

His order forbade him to publish. A 1962 Vatican decree condemned his works. For years his works were circulated privately among Jesuits in mimeographed copies.

His seminal influence can be seen in the thought of Fr. Thomas Berry, who for years headed the Teilhard de Chardin Society and is our church’s most probing thinker on the human relationship with nature and its implications for religion. His diagnosis of our condition has held true for many willing to work for a cure.

It is not a technological or social problem that hinders us, Berry said, but pathology deep in the human soul blocking our way of seeing and naming what is within God’s realm. Is revelation found in the natural world, the primary divine revelation? What sense does it make to have spiritually or even physically healthy humans living on a dying planet? Berry challenged us to re-examine fundamental views.

Active followers include Fr. Diarmuid O’Murchu, Srs. Miriam MacGillis and Paula Gonzalez, Fr. Al Fritsch and others. Some have felt Vatican scrutiny.

The U.S. bishops, meanwhile, have a good environmental record, with pastoral letters and projects centered on earth stewardship and sustainable agriculture, partly due to the influence of Holy Cross Br. Dave Andrews, former director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, and his staff. In fact, the conference’s promotion of earth-friendly practices in the church dates to the 1920s.

On their Web site, a page titled “Religious Communities and Centers on the Land” describes 50 or more communities around the country engaged in land stewardship, environmental education and other earth-friendly enterprises. Women outnumber the men.

Many others throughout the church have tirelessly campaigned for the inclusion of earth concerns in activism and teaching.

Mark Stoll, history professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, contends that Catholics have not been in the environmental movement’s forefront because our religious views traditionally encouraged a sense of sacredness within a human community rather than with nature.

“Religiously minded Catholics,” he writes, “dedicated themselves in service to the church, or to the poor, or to the unconverted -- to society, in other words ... and by and large left nature writing to Protestants, alone in the woods with their God.”

True, by and large: An environmentalist Mount Rushmore would carry busts of Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, John Muir and David Brower. None of them were Catholic.

Yet justice and peace issues, long at the forefront of Catholic social teaching, are now augmented and informed by earth advocacy. Environmental themes appear in homilies. Thermostats behind pews are turned down on winter Sunday mornings.

“Tree-hugging Catholic” is no longer an oxymoron. Even the pope is one.

National Catholic Reporter August 1, 2008