Globe & Mail features Catholic eco-action and Benedictine Handbook
November 19, 2007:
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"Pope Benedict XVI has picked up his predecessor's green theme and is pushing it hard. This time it appears to be
sticking. Where endless scientific warnings have
failed, can religion now succeed?"
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The Pope and his billion-plus followers
have seen the ecological light, Eric Reguly of the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper
reports. Now the world will find out whether
faith can move mountains.
By ERIC REGULY
Saturday, October 27, 2007 - Page F1 Globe and Mail
ROME -- To some Catholics, confirmation of
paradise lost came on New Year's Day, 1990, when
a hunched old man talked about a planet
"suffering" from environmental degradation. His
language was direct and forceful. He mentioned
"the threat of ecological breakdown" and
"uncontrolled deforestation" and how the culture
of "instant gratification and consumerism" was
tearing the world apart. He called the
"greenhouse effect" a crisis, the result of
"vastly increased energy needs."
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| "Elegantly written and impeccably researched, it
discusses the sources of pollution and offers
suggestions on how to cure or reduce them..." Review of Listening to the Earth by Toronto's Globe and Mail. |
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The man was Pope John Paul II and he issued his
climate-change warning a full seven years before
the Kyoto Protocol came to life. But his public
message - "Peace with God the Creator, Peace with
all of Creation" - delivered on the World Day of
Peace celebration, was soon forgotten. A war in
the Persian Gulf was about to start.
Seventeen years and one pope later, stories about
environmental degradation in general and climate
change in particular are gripping the media,
world leaders and scientists. The weight of
evidence says climate change is real, caused by
human activity, accelerating and potentially
catastrophic to life on Earth. Australian
scientists this week said the growth rate in the
emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse
gas, has averaged 3.3 per cent a year since 2000,
compared with 1.1 per cent in the 1990s.
The world's billion-plus Catholics (among 2.1
billion Christians) pretty much ignored the dire
environmental warnings, which John Paul repeated
often during the rest of his Vatican stay. But
now the conservative German cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005,
has picked up his predecessor's green theme and
is pushing it hard. This time it appears to be
sticking. Where endless scientific warnings have
failed, can religion now succeed?
Cardinals and bishops and priests are using the
pulpit to convince the faithful that the Earth is
god's creation and should be protected. Men in
robes are making presentations at climate-change
conferences and in classrooms, writing articles
and going on TV to spread the message. The
Catholic Church does not believe climate change
is purely the province of scientists,
environmental groups and politicians.
"We just can't leave this problem to them," says
Christopher Toohey, 55, bishop of a desert
diocese in New South Wales, a Vatican adviser on
climate change and the chairman of Catholic
Earthcare, the Australian bishops' ecological
agency. "The Vatican has to be there too. Good
religion makes good human beings, and good human
beings relate to the world around them."
France's Cardinal Paul Poupard, president of the
Pontifical Council for Culture, which oversees
the Vatican's cultural, educational and
scientific activities, cites the church's
religious and moral obligations to take action.
"The Book of Genesis," he has said, "tells us of
a beginning in which God placed man as guardian
over the Earth to make it fruitful. When man
forgets that he is a faithful servant of this
Earth, it becomes a desert that threatens the
survival of all creation."
PRACTISE WHAT IT PREACHESThe Vatican knows it must practise what it
preaches if its green messages are to be taken
seriously. Early last month, Pope Benedict led
the first eco-friendly Catholic youth rally, in
Loreto, a shrine city on Italy's Adriatic coast.
As many as 500,000 people attended. They were
given backpacks made from recyclable material and
crank-powered flashlights. The prayer books were
printed on recycled paper and meals were served
on recycled plates. The Pope said: "Courageous
choices that can recreate a strong alliance
between man and Earth must be made before it is
too late."
Monsignor Melchor Sanchez de Toca y Alameda,
undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for
Culture, called Loreto a test run. "What is more
powerful than words is example, like Loreto," he
said. "The Loreto pattern will probably be
repeated at World Youth Day," a reference to the
far bigger Catholic rally to be held next July in
Sydney.
Several weeks before the rally, Cardinal Poupard
announced that the Vatican - population 700, with
about 100 registered cars, one gas station and no
industry - would become the world's first
carbon-neutral state. It is doing so by planting
hundreds of trees in Hungary's BЭkk National
Park. The project, called the Vatican Climate
Forest in Europe, will be large enough to offset
its relatively tiny carbon-dioxide emissions. In
a few months, Vatican engineers will install more
than 1,000 solar panels on the roof of Paul VI
Hall, which is as big a football field and holds
12,000 people.
Pope Benedict also approves of nuclear energy
because it is non-polluting, and is under some
pressure from the greenest Catholics to say a
mass on a melting glacier or in a disappearing
rain forest. The tactic would buy him global
media coverage, but would risk being seen as
"gimmicky" or "grandstanding," Bishop Toohey says.
Still, given the Pope's green agenda, such a mass
would come as no surprise. There are also rumours
that he will issue an encyclical on the
environment next year. Formal statements sent to
the bishops, encyclicals are rare and considered
"the most important messages" from the pope,
Father Sanchez says.
The rising papal awareness of the environment has
mobilized so many like-minded people that it is
attracting academic interest - a program in religion and
ecology developed by husband-and-wife scholars
Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim at Yale
University.
U.S. bishops are using their year-old Catholic
Coalition on Climate Change to conduct forums on
faith and climate change and are running
workshops to help individual churches reduce
their carbon footprints.
And last year, the
Benedictine Sisters in Erie, Pa., published a
200-page document called Listening to the Earth:
An Environmental Audit for Benedictine
Communities. Financed by the World Bank,
elegantly written and impeccably researched, it
discusses the sources of pollution and offers
suggestions on how to cure or reduce them, right
down to what to make of white smoke from a diesel
engine ("faulty fuel-injection system").
In a sense, the Catholic Church is going full
circle, says Rev. Paul Haffner, a Briton who
teaches a course based on a book he has written,
entitled Toward a Theology of the Environment, at
Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University.
According to Father Haffner, there was a time
when Catholics respected the environment; it was
part of their religious "community." Then came
the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
Religion became a "private matter," and the
environment suffered. Now, the church is trying
to return environmental conservation to the
religious fold.
Which is why Bishop Toohey says it is no accident
that the Vatican's ecological push is being
championed by "conservatives" like himself and
popes John Paul and Benedict. "We may be
theological conservatives," he says. "But we also
see our role in coming from the classic
definition of conservatism - I see my role as
conserving something."
STRONG PAPAL LANGUAGEWhile the bishops, priests, nuns and academics
raise public awareness about ecological
protection and climate change, the 80-year-old
pontiff is delivering a steady flow of green
messages, addresses and speeches that break from
the papal tradition of subtle and sometimes
hesitant language.
Some of the reasons for his keen environmental
awareness may be personal. Germans in general are
among the greenest of Europeans. Also, "he's
Bavarian, grew up close to the Alps and has a
link to nature," Father Sanchez says. And
Germany's experience in the Second World War no
doubt made him even more aware of man's
destructive tendencies.
"Today, we all see that man can destroy the
foundations of his existence, his Earth," he said
in July while speaking at a small church in
northern Italy. "Hence, we can no longer simply
do what we like or what seems useful and
promising at the time with this Earth of ours,
with the reality entrusted on us."
In other words, Catholics have to smarten up
before they destroy what God entrusted them to
protect. But, practically speaking, will the
church's message, or that of any religion, save
the planet? Catholics in the Western world tend
to be independent thinkers who don't
automatically march to the pope's orders. The
anti-abortion and anti-contraception stances of
the past two popes are widely ignored. Why will
the environmental campaign be any different?
Catholic academics and theologians think that the
two types of message cannot be compared. Deciding
to have an abortion is a highly personal and
agonizing matter. Recycling pop bottles is not.
Scientific evidence of the dangers of climate
change is abundant. Father Haffner notes that the
Benedictines and the Franciscans have a long
tradition of environmental awareness - in fact,
St. Francis was made the patron saint of the
environment by Pope John Paul II.
Environmental groups such as Conservation
International (CI) of Washington D.C., an
independent organization focused on preserving
biodiversity, say all faiths can play a credible
role in raising awareness about climate change
precisely because they are not seen as lobbyists
or scientific, environmental or political
organizations.
Politicians have short attention spans and are
easy to ignore, scientists often couch their
findings in probabilities and environmental
groups, with their consistently dire warnings,
can scare people into inaction.
Hard-core greenies, Bishop Toohey told a
pontifical climate-change conference in April,
are "perceived by the general population as
negative and 'finger waving.'... Telling people
things are bad all the time and we are to blame
is quite simply bad psychology. This makes people
feel disempowered, demoralized and fatalistic."
Enter religion. "In a vacuum created by the lack
of political leadership and the [climate change]
wiggle room from the scientists, you have to seek
the moral authority and leadership from another
area," says Ben Campbell, director of a
Conservation International program that helps
religions develop conservation and preservation
partnerships. "The churches, mosques and
synagogues can provide this authority."
The 41-year-old Lutheran is especially optimistic
that religion can produce ecological success
stories in the developing world, such as Latin
America and Africa, where religious groups are
often big landowners (the Russian Orthodox Church
controls the use of 18.5 million hectares of
Siberian forest) and have more influence in
secular life than in Europe or North America.
Take the case of the church, the palm and the
parrot.
VICTIM OF PALM SUNDAYIn Colombia and neighbouring Ecuador, the little
yellow-eared parrot (Ognorhynchus icterotis) was
facing extinction. The bird's habitat is the wax
palm, itself an endangered species having been
cut by the millions for use as fronds in Palm
Sunday celebrations (to commemorate the entry of
Jesus into Jerusalem). By the late 1990s, the
population had shrunk to a mere 81 parrots in
Colombia and none in Ecuador.
In came CI. It formed a partnership with the
church, the Episcopalian Conference of Colombia
and a local environmental group to protect the
parrot through a campaign that mixed religion,
science and mass media. It worked. The churches
found a frond alternative to the wax palm and the
parrot population has bounced back, to 642 by
last year. Now, the save-the-parrot campaign,
called "Reconcile with Nature," is trying to
reintroduce the bird to Ecuador.
Christianity is not the only faith mobilizing the
green forces. The October issue of Geographical
Magazine, published by Britain's Royal
Geographical Society, tells the story of a reef
off the Tanzanian island of Misali that was one
of the Indian Ocean's major turtle-nesting sites.
But in the 1990s, local fishermen swapped their
nets for dynamite, which was great for catching
fish - they just needed to be scooped up
afterward - but shattered the reef and its
biodiversity.
A government campaign to educate the fishermen
didn't work. Neither did a ban on dynamite; the
fishermen ignored it. Things turned in the reef's
favour, the magazine reports, only with the
arrival of Fazlun Khalid, director of the
British-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and
Environmental Scientists. He convinced the
fisherman that Allah embraces everything and
nature requires stewardship, which doesn't
include dynamite. The blasting stopped and the
reef is being protected.
But the Vatican has the potential to exert
influence even greater than that of Islam. Where
mosques tend to be autonomous and not subject to
central authority, Catholicism is one of the few
highly centralized religions. Also, it has few
layers of bureaucracy, making rapid communication
easy - the pope can send out a green message and
expect it to filter down in a hurry. "Every
bishop has his own diocese," Father Sanchez says.
"If the pope acts in a certain way, the bishops
react."
Bishop Toohey says the Catholic Church "can be a
very powerful agent for change," and CI's Mr.
Campbell agrees, although neither expects
Catholics to turn into ecological knights in
shining green armour overnight, given the rate at
which human behaviour changes.
But there's a good chance that Benedict will go
down as a "green" pope, especially if he issues
an encyclical on the environment and turns the
next World Youth Day into a sort of environmental
or climate change Woodstock.
In a sense, this would do a disservice to John
Paul because, as Gregorian University's Father
Haffner points out, it was his message in 1990,
which referred to the "greenhouse effect" years
before the term became popular, that became "the
foundation of the Catholic Church's position on
ecology."
That may be true, but his successor also deserves
a lot of credit - for his impeccable timing.
Eric Reguly is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in Rome.
Signs the Vatican has seen the lightThe billion-plus-member Roman Catholic Church:
** Sponsored a Conference on Climate Change and Development in Rome in April.
** Is offsetting its carbon-dioxide emissions by
planting trees in Hungary's BЭkk National Park
** Will install 1,000 solar panels on the roof of
Paul VI Hall, near St. Peter's Basilica.
** Held the first eco-friendly youth rally in
Loreto, Italy, last month and plans the same
theme for the larger World Youth Day rally next
year in Australia.
** Is encouraging individual dioceses and churches
to offset or reduce their carbon footprints
** May issue an encyclical, the ultimate papal
message, on the environment next year.
Environmental quotations from Biblical teachings"The Lord God took the man and settled him in the
garden of Eden to cultivate and take care of it." Genesis 2:15 cited by Catholics who see humanity's
role as stewards of nature, not its masters)
"And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." Genesis 1:31 cited by Pope John Paul II in 1990 to show that God entrusted creation to human care
"Therefore the land mourns and all who dwell in
it languish, and also the beasts of the field and
the birds of the air and even the fish of the sea
are taken away." Hosea 4:3 cited by Pope John Paul II to back his belief that Earth suffers when humanity turns its back on Creation.
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