Fragile World

Ecology and the Church

William T. Cavanaugh, Cavanaugh

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781498283410
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In Fragile World: Ecology and the Church, scholars and activists from Christian communities as far-flung as Honduras, the Philippines, Colombia, and Kenya present a global angle on the global ecological crisis--in both its material and spiritual senses--and offer Catholic resources for responding to it. This volume explores the deep interconnections, for better and for worse, between the global North and the global South, and analyzes the relationship among the physical environment, human society, culture, theology, and economics--the "integral ecology" described by Pope Francis in Laudato Si'.Integral ecology demands that we think deeply about humans and the physical environment, but also about the God who both created the world and sustains it in being. At its root, the ecological crisis is a theological crisis, not only in the way that humans regard creation and their place in it, but in the way that humans think about God. For Pope Francis in Laudato Si', the root of the crisis is that we humans have tried to put ourselves in God's place. According to Pope Francis, therefore, "A fragile world, entrusted by God to human care, challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing, and limiting our power."

Part One

Catholic Social Teaching

1

Turning Over the Right Rocks: Finding Legacies of Catholic Environmentalism

Christopher Hamlin

In 1985, when I began teaching at a Catholic university, the environment was no significant part of that university’s mission.13 A few years later, on the first day of my initial offering of an environmental history course (then a new field), I asked students what the environment had to do with Catholicism. Not only had they no clue, I saw signs that the question failed even to register, so remote were the realms of faith and nature. There was, by then, a Catholic side of the environmental movement that had begun two decades earlier. Catholic social teachings translated easily into sustainability, and environmental concerns appeared in encyclicals and bishops’ letters. There were communities of various sorts, lay and religious, living sustainably, and issue- or place-oriented groups, including student groups at Catholic universities. And yet my students’ bewilderment was certainly understandable. Environmental matters were scientific and secular. They were not at the core of parish life; they were absent from Catholic history (Catholicism, too, was largely overlooked in environmental history).

My own knowledge was sketchy, too, and I sought to broaden it. Though I have published little on the matter, much of my subsequent research has concerned the theologies of nature of many branches of Christianity, and, especially in the case of Catholicism, the institutionalization in mid-twentieth century rural American parishes of an approach to sustainability that, to a striking degree, anticipates Pope Francis’s recent Laudato Si’.14

By consolidating many elements of Catholicism, this new encyclical makes what was peripheral central. Pope Francis has broadened and transformed the domain of what may be called religious environmentalism, which, particularly in the United States, had hitherto conspicuously reflected a Protestant heritage, a matter I will explore below. But, as appropriate to an encyclical, concerned with principles valid to all times and places, he has not dwelt in details (with the exception of a sobering assessment of the current biogeophysical state of the planet). My hope here is to fill in some of that detail, particularly with regard to the vexed issue of how faith might inform practice.

Let me begin with three provisos:

• First, I do not mean to suggest that each religion needs to have a distinct approach to environmental matters; I shall suggest, however, that there are profound differences of orientation between Laudato Si’ and most Protestant environmentalism.

• Second, I shall not assess Pope Francis as a theologian, an articulator of the most authentic Catholic theological response to the crises of the day. Such an assessment of a long and complex document would go far beyond my scope.

• Third, I do believe that an approach like that in Laudato Si’ is much needed. Most importantly, it bridges the gap between concepts of personhood and states of nature, drawing in institutions and technologies in the process.15 That vision is not well articulated elsewhere; it is hard to imagine another magisterium from which it could be. My concern is with how Catholics and others might find ways to live that vision, not in heroic defiance of prevailing institutions, but as modest alternatives to them. Here, precedents help. It is easier to do something when one knows it has been done. I will explore precedents of several sorts, but chiefly at what will be three critical sites of the reception/implementation of Laudato Si’: Catholic universities (and other forms of higher school), seminaries, and in the social and economic institutions of parish life.

First, however, it is important to explore the claim that Catholicism and Protestantism have developed different orientations toward environmental issues.16 Pope Francis does not discuss the history of ideas about the relation of religion to environment. Christians in general have been on the defensive about such matters ever since 1967, when the eminent medieval historian of technology Lynn White Jr. charged Judeo-Christianity with responsibility for “our Ecologic Crisis” in an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.17 There and elsewhere, White considered the convergence of several elements during the High Middle Ages: a contempus mundi that came through some strands of Augustinianism (even if Augustine was rejecting even stronger versions that circulated in the early church) and was exemplified in some forms of ascetic monasticism, and an unexpected consequence of Benedictine-style monasticism, the accumulation of capital (and thus, through re-investment, the emergence of a kind of capitalism) that came through transforming wildernesses into productive estates. Others had identified a medieval industrial revolution based on capital-intensive prime movers and the application to wealth-creating and nature-changing uses; White famously added the transformation of concepts of virtue from internal mental states to economically approved habits. He also amplified admiration for what were presumed to be more nature-friendly and less anthropocentric cultures—premodern cultures, ancient paganism, and “oriental” cultures. These were seen to acknowledge an equality in all things; they stressed cyclicity and balance in contrast to the Judeo-Christian linear cosmology of creation, sin, redemption, and consummation.18

As an afterthought, White suggested St. Francis as a model for a contemplative and biocentric form of Christian spirituality. In the eco-spirituality and eco-theology that blossomed in the aftermath of White’s essay, St. Francis’s Canticle addressing the birds and beasts as sister and brother would be often cited as writers sought to refute White and/or to redress the problem he had pointed to. The Canticle is prominent in Laudato Si’ (sections 10–12). And yet, however important as an expression of religious feeling, St. Francis’s nature writings do not derive from, nor easily connect to, theological mainstreams beyond the maxim of the goodness of creation. Had White not called attention to it, it is unlikely that this overlooked aspect of the complicated Franciscan tradition would have the significance it now has.

Focused on medieval history, White overlooked a large scholarly literature developing in the early twentieth century, which assigned profound changes in views of nature to the early modern period, and the Reformation in particular: best known are the works of Max Weber, R. H. Tawney, Robert Merton, and Lewis Mumford. They stressed various aspects: the disenchantment of nature and triumph of a devitalized materialism; the replacement of communitarianism by individualism; and the emergence of new economic values in Calvinism. Tawney eloquently pictures the lonely Puritan, puzzling out his salvation on a cold, fallen dunghill earth, and taking material wealth as an indicator of election. Mumford sketched the dehumanizing aspects of what Pope Francis calls in section 112 of Laudato Si’ “the dominant technocratic paradigm.”19

Tawney’s, in particular, was a Christian critique. Their assessments, and those of other non-Marxist analysts of industrialism and ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Catholic Social Teaching
• Part Two: Cry of the Earth
• Part Three: Theology
• Part Four: Ethics
• Part Five: Pastoral Resources
• Part Six: Eschatology
• Bibliography