Eco-skeptics put spin on Benedict's message

Analysis

One reliable way to gauge the impact of a papal message is the amount of energy that pundits invest in analyzing, dissecting and recasting it. The rule of thumb is that the more spin a given statement breeds, the more important it probably is.

By that test, Pope Benedict XVI’s teaching on the environment, expressed most recently in a message for the church-sponsored “World Day of Peace” on Jan. 1, would seem to be pretty important indeed.

Experts regard Benedict’s strong ecological streak as among the most original features of his social teaching. It’s been expressed both in word and deed, with the latter including the installation of solar panels atop the Vatican’s audience hall (complete with a digital display inside the hall showing energy savings) and replanting a stretch of forest in central Hungary sufficient to make the Vatican Europe’s first “carbon-neutral” state.

In turn, that record has bred a cottage industry of exegesis, especially among Catholic eco-skeptics worried that the pope (perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not) may be lending aid and comfort to a movement they regard as an attack on capitalism and limited government, under the guise of hype about global warming, rising sea levels, and other nightmare scenarios.

To be sure, Benedict’s shade of green is hardly that of Earth First. He insists that care for creation must be grounded in faith in a Creator, that nature not be romanticized at the expense of humanity, and that the “natural law” that limits exploitation of the earth also applies to defense of human life -- meaning, in practical terms, that population control is not an acceptable environmental strategy.

John Carr, director of the Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development for the U.S. bishops, said all this amounts to a “distinctively and authentically Catholic” approach to the environment, one that “doesn’t fit conventional political and ideological categories.”

For most Catholic skeptics, however, it’s less Benedict’s theological premises than his policy prescriptions that cause heartburn. In the World Peace Day message, the pope called for urgent action on a wide range of threats, including “climate change, desertification, the degradation and loss of productivity in vast agricultural areas, the pollution of rivers and aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the increase in extreme weather, and the deforestation of equatorial and tropical areas,” as well as “environmental refugees” and conflicts linked to natural resources.

The fact that the message appeared against the backdrop of the recent summit on climate change, held Dec. 6-18 in Copenhagen, Denmark, caused particular consternation among Catholics who were critical of both the key players at the summit and their aims.

Titled “If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Care for Creation,” Benedict’s World Peace Day message also recommended:

• A new mode of calculating the cost of economic activity that would factor in environmental impact;
• Greater investment in solar energy and other forms of energy with a reduced environmental footprint;
• Strategies of rural development concentrated on small-scale farmers and their families;
• Progressive disarmament, including “a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Reaction among skeptics in the Catholic fold has tended to splinter between those who say the pope has been misunderstood, and those who believe it’s the pope himself who doesn’t quite get it.

Perhaps the most striking example of the former came in an essay in the Italian newspaper Il Foglio by Giuliano Ferrara, an atheist who’s nevertheless widely influential in Catholic circles. In the past, Ferrara has forcefully defended the church’s positions in the culture wars, especially on abortion and euthanasia.

In a Dec. 16 essay, Ferrara insisted that Benedict “does not belong to the church of Al Gore.”

The pontiff, Ferrara wrote, does not deny human abuse of nature, but rejects “environmentalism as a religion.” Benedict’s teaching, Ferrara said, is based on belief in a creator-God who entrusts nature to humanity, not on “ideologies feigned as science.”

The pope’s teaching, Ferrara wrote, should not be confused with “the magic environmentalism of the gurus, and the militant organizations who foster a global redemption.”

Another noted Italian commentator, Sandro Magister, linked Benedict’s message to two recent articles in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, that were critical of the Copenhagen summit. One of those pieces came from the new head of the Vatican bank, Italian economist Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who insisted that Benedict’s approach is radically different from the “nihilism” that leads to “population control and de-industrialization,” which Gotti Tedeschi perceived to be behind the deliberations in Copenhagen.

Back in the United States, Deacon Keith Fournier of the Web portal Catholic Online posted an essay claiming that news reports on the World Peace Day message “intimated that the pope had somehow joined the fringe of the environmental movement,” and that many reporters had “fit the fact of the letter into their ready-made, simplistic template.”

Fournier cited a line from Benedict’s message to undercut those impressions: “Notions of the environment inspired by eco-centrism and bio-centrism,” Benedict wrote, “open the way to a new pantheism tinged with Neo-Paganism, which would see the source of man’s salvation in nature alone, understood in purely naturalistic terms.”

Around the Catholic world, like-minded voices joined the effort to accent what Benedict did not say -- and in particular, to distinguish the pontiff from the Copenhagen crowd.

Writing in Canada’s National Post, Fr. Raymond D’Souza, a frequent commentator on church affairs, published a piece under the headline of “The Vatican’s green gambit.” In it, D’Souza suggested that Benedict is well aware of “the dangers of aligning himself with the more strident elements of the Copenhagen circus, of which Al Gore might be considered the principal ringmaster.”

The pope’s position, D’Souza wrote, must be distinguished from forms of secular environmentalism, especially those that see limiting population growth as key to protecting nature. (D’Souza cited the case of a British nongovernmental organization that invited people attending the Copenhagen summit to contribute to population control efforts, under the slogan that a “non-person cannot produce CO2.”)

The World Peace Day message is not the first time that commentators have felt the need to frame the pope’s environmental teaching. Last August, when Benedict treated the environment in his social encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute wrote that upon examination the pope’s “ ‘greenness’ turns out to be rather pale.”

“Benedict knows that neither international organizations nor public opinion determine the truth about climate change and its causes,” Gregg wrote. “That’s a question for science, and many reputable scientists dispute aspects of the prevailing tenets of climate change to which some environmentalists seem religiously wedded.”

Benedict, Gregg wrote, is also not afraid “to underline the dark, anti-human side to much green ideology.”

Other skeptics have been more inclined to point the finger at Benedict himself, suggesting that the problem is not merely that the pope has been misinterpreted, but that he may be out of his depth.

Tom Roeser, a media commentator in Chicago and a Catholic, recently wrote that Benedict’s call for new government controls on the environment in his World Peace Day message “reflects a Bismarckian view of the big state, versus appreciation of the value of entrepreneurism.”

“The pope is not an expert on the environment or environmental science,” Roeser wrote. “Thus it would be foolish, after consideration of his views, to accept [his] views on science and other issues not specifically connected to faith and morals as anything approaching ex cathedra,” meaning definitive.

Catholic voices more sympathetic to the environmental cause, naturally enough, often see such reactions as shaped more by secular ideology than a careful consideration of Benedict’s argument.

“I always thought the important question was not whether the pope agrees with me, but whether I agree with the pope,” Carr said. “We need to set aside some of our own biases and learn from his unique moral reflections on the inseparable link between natural and human ecology.”

In many ways, the fusillade of commentary amounts to a Catholic version of the tussle between greens and skeptics in the secular arena. Setting aside the merits of any given interpretation, some observers believe the sheer volume of punditry indicates that Benedict is getting through.

Walt Grazer, an expert on Catholic environmentalism who attended the Copenhagen summit, said that from the very beginning, Benedict’s teaching has “evoked a range of responses across a broad spectrum of Catholics.”

That frisson, Grazer told NCR, indicates that “Pope Benedict has touched a nerve within the Catholic community about one of the more important issues facing the entire human family in the 21st century.”

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