Current Roman Catholicism And The Environment
The largest Christian communion on earth in terms of present membership is the Roman Catholic Church, and here again there has been notable resistance to official comment on the environmental crisis. The most prominent focus of Catholic criticism of modern technology and the lifestyle and ethics it has promoted is not the ecological crisis, but the use of contraception and abortion to control human sexual reproduction and family size. In many parts of the developing world, the Catholic Church has used its considerable influence in schools, in hospitals, and in public life in Catholic countries to suppress knowledge of birth-control techniques other than abstinence. The Catholic pro-life ethic has yet to consider fully how the dramatic expansion of the human species that occurred in the twentieth century will affect the lives of other creatures on earth. At international gatherings such as the Rio Earth Summit, Catholic influ
ence has been used to suppress reference to the pressure of the human population on the planet and the need to restrain further expansion of the human species.
Some detect a shift in the last decade of the papacy of Pope John Paul II (r. 1978-2005), during which he seemed to have awoken to the significance of the environmental crisis as another of the threats to life furthered by the ''culture of death,'' which, the Church has traditionally maintained, fostered the growing use of abortion and modern methods of preventing conception. In his first sermon as pope, Benedict XVI used the metaphor of the desert to link the spiritual vacuity of materialism and consumerism with ecological destruction. As he put it, ''The deserts of the world are spreading because of the growing desert in the human heart.'' This reference suggests that the new pope harbors a stronger ecological awareness than that of his predecessor. Pope Benedict XVI has begun to address the ecological, and especially climatic, impacts of the Vatican on the environment, using Vatican funds to purchase a formerly forested area in Hungary, where the Vatican will sponsor the replanting of forest to offset the greenhouse-gas emissions of Vatican flights and other activities. The pope has also installed solar panels on the roof of the papal residency in Vatican City. In this respect, Benedict XVI may be said to be following the lead of such Catholic theologians as Leonardo Boff and Sean McDonagh, who have been adumbrating a Catholic ecotheology for more than thirty years, and of Catholic lay communities in South America and the Philippines that have witnessed environmental problems arising from industrial development and agribusiness in Catholic countries in the South.
The environmental turn of some Catholic theologians, particularly in the South, is now mirrored by a green turn in religious communities in the developed world. Thus, communities of nuns in North America are recovering a traditional connection between the religious vocation and the care of Creation. These ''green sisters'' or ''eco-nuns'' are using the Church's ownership of agricultural land and the buildings, diets, and lifestyles of religious communities to create a new sensitivity to Creation. Some have started using organic methods on their farms and market gardens. Others are utilizing renewable energy in their community houses. This move toward a religious practice of care for the Creation is part of a larger refocusing of the Christian tradition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Many of the new liturgies written under the influence of the liturgical movement since the mid-1960s have given a more prominent role to the doctrine of creation and to the place of nonhuman creatures as revelatory points of contact with the divine Spirit. And many congregations and ecumenical associations have been endeavoring locally and regionally to practice care for the Creation in their material relations with the nonhuman world. Thus church buildings on every continent may now be seen displaying solar panels as a symbolic witness to their members and communities for the need for modern humans to live within the carbon budget of the planet, rather than profligately burning stored carbon in ways that damage the earth for present and future generations. There is also growing Christian involvement in secular environmental initiatives as Christians overcome their suspicion that such movements represent not only a turn to the earth but a denial of the role of the Creator in creating the earth.
In a historical sense, modern environmental protest is a child of religious Protestantism inasmuch as Protestantism gave rise to the culture of multiparty democracy of modern nation-states. And with the turn of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians toward environmental awareness, the ecological alienation that was manifest in both Catholic and Protestant teachings about creation after the Reformation may at last be being healed. For in ethics, practice, and theology, there is increasing emphasis on the ecological effects of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the creative Word, in healing human-earth relations, as well as the human body and soul.
SEE ALSO Bible; Chipko Movement; Earth Charter;
Ecotheology; Environmental Philosophy: II. Medieval
Philosophy; Process Philosophy; St. Francis of Assisi;
Stewardship; Sustainability; White, Lynn, Jr.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Bradley, Ian. 1990. God Is Green: Ecology for Christians. New
York: Doubleday. Bratton, Susan Power. 1993. Christianity, Wilderness, and Wildlife: The Original Desert Solitaire. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press. Deckers, Jan. 2004. ''Christianity and Ecological Ethics: The Significance of Process Thought and a Panexperientialist Critique of Strong Anthropocentrism.'' Ecotheology 9(3): 359-387.
Derr, Thomas Sieger. 1996. Environmental Ethics and Christian
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Northcott, Michael S. 1996. The Environment and Christian Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Northcott, Michael S. 2007. A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press.
Rasmussen, Larry. 1996. Earth Community, Earth Ethics. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1992. Gaia and God. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.
Schaeffer, Francis, with Udo Middleman. 1992. Pollution and the Death of Man, new, expanded ed. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.
Thomas, Keith. 1986. Man and the Natural World. London: Penguin.
White, Lynn. 1967. ''The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.'' Science 155: 1203-1207.
Michael Northcott
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