Is
Catholicism on a slide into nature mysticism? It is a discomforting
question for a Catholic to ask, but it bears scrutiny. Messianic
environmentalism is about to assume the status of dogma in Pope Francis’
looming encyclical. Once discarding our incandescent light bulbs and
biking to work become a religious obligation, it will be too late to ask
the question.
The temptation to grand ideological transformations to reclaim an
imagined pristine environment is not new. Francis is not the first pope
to carry a green torch. John Paul II celebrated the 1990 World Day of
Peace with this:
Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment,
people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to
use the goods of the earth as we have in the past. . . . a new
ecological awareness is beginning to emerge which . . . ought to be
encouraged to develop into concrete programs and initiatives.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) took the
cue. Six months later, they began drafting a 16-page pastoral letter
proclaiming an environmental crisis and terming it a moral crisis.
“Renewing the Earth” emerged from conference in 1991, demanding urgent
action “to ensure the survival of a healthy planet.” A blend of bien
pensant political opinion and moral fervor, its tenor calls to mind
those heady leaflets issued by the October Revolution.
The New Faith requires “a new solidarity” against ecological crisis.
The masses are called upon to renounce the mailed fist of development
and join the heroic struggle for “the planetary common good.” (The
masses to whom the bishops address themselves are those bourgeois ones,
like themselves, who read Gerard Manley Hopkins. “God’s Grandeur” is
quoted in full.)
When Global Warming Really Does Become Religion
In the words of atmospheric physicist John Reid, anthropogenic global
warming is “the central tenet of this new belief system in much the
same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. . .
. My skepticism about AGW arises from the fact that, as a physicist who
has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying
science is. In effect, the scientific method has been abandoned in this
field.”
If creation and Creator are one, nature itself is sacred. Any animist could say the same.
But our shepherds know better: AGW is incontrovertible. A decadent
West has imperiled the planet. The bishops repudiate “voracious
consumerism of the developed world.” They reject material growth as a
model of development: “Unrestrained economic growth is the not the
answer to improving the lives of the poor.”
If not economic growth, then what? Answer: “an exceptional call to
conversion” that will lead Christians “to find God dwelling in created
things.” Straddling the orphic and the theological, the bishops hasten
to add that God also surpasses all things. But a canker has dropped on
the rose. The addendum does nothing to blunt the mystical assertion that
God dwells in nature. And if creation and Creator are one, nature
itself is sacred. Any animist could say the same.
Does Loving Nature Fit Catholic Doctrine?
There are risks to this seep of eco-spirituality into the Church. No
one denies man’s role as steward of the world he inhabits. Assertions
that Western man is oblivious or hostile to that role is a straw man.
And all suggestion that the developed world is indifferent to the poor
is a slur on centuries of effort to raise men above subsistence and the
cruelties of the natural world. Nature is to be respected. But loved?
Nature kills. We can love nature only to the degree of our control of
it, our protection from it.
Nature is to be respected. But loved?
Where do proclamations of nature love lead except into the
eco-mysticism that installs a shrine to Gaia in Manhattan’s Cathedral of
St. John the Divine? Contemporary nature piety, couched in religious
phrases, is the springboard for re-sacralizing the natural world. It
reverses Christianity’s historic—and life-enhancing—de-divinization of
nature. It is neo-paganism by the back door.
Francis enjoins the world to protect “God’s plan as inscribed in
nature.” Lovely as that sounds, what does it mean? What is the plan,
including as it must mortality and all its dreaded agents? Episcopal
rhapsodies about the “beauty and richness of nature [that] raises our
minds and hearts to God” are reckless indulgences in the romantic myth
of a once-upon-a-time harmony between pre-industrial man and his
environment—one without natural disaster, disease, disfigurement, or
rapacity.
From Parishioners to Activists
In 1993, the USCCB followed its pastoral letter with an Environmental
Justice Program. Its stated intention was to “motivate Catholics to a
deeper reverence and respect for God’s creation” and to encourage them
to address environmental problems. In other words, to become activists.
Benedict plastered the Paul VI Audience Hall
with 1,000 solar panels and agreed to a carbon off-set scheme that, had
it materialized, would have crowned the Vatican the world’s first
carbon-neutral state.
And they have. The Catholic Climate Movement is a network of more
than 100 organizations scattered across the globe laboring to “respond
to climate change from a Catholic perspective.” Its stated goal is to
“keep the global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius
(relative to pre-industrial levels.)”
Among member groups based in the United States are: Catholic
Charities, Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Climate Covenant, Pax
Christi International, Franciscan Action Network, Franciscan
International (NY/ Geneva), Sisters of Charity of New York, Maryknoll
Office for Global Concerns, CatholicEcology.net, Ignatian Solidarity
Network, Ignatian Volunteer Corps, Leadership Conference of Women
Religious, Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, and the National Catholic
Education Association. The list goes on.
Benedict XVI furthered John Paul’s endorsement of a push for
eco-programs. Daniel Stone, writing in National Geographic in 2013,
stated that one lasting legacy of Benedict XVI, dubbed the “Green Pope,”
was how he steered the global debate over climate change and “made
environmental awareness a key tenant of his tenure.” Benedict plastered
the Paul VI Audience Hall with 1,000 solar panels and agreed to a carbon
off-set scheme that, had it materialized, would have crowned the
Vatican the world’s first carbon-neutral state.
Following papal lead, “environmental stewardship” has become a staple
on the list of advocacy topics of national dioceses around the world.
The USCCB designed a toolkit for missionizing Catholic college and
university students on sustainability. The subject is too urgent to be
left to local efforts. In “Caritas in Veritate” (2009), Benedict
signaled his hope for a “world political authority.” This global
political body—a Brussels on steroids—would dictate procedures governing
multiple global issues, with particular attention to environmental
ones.
Beware the ‘Settled Science’
Now comes Francis, advised by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: “On
climate change, there is a clear, definitive, and ineluctable ethical
imperative to act.”
The science is neither clear nor definitive, and the Vatican appears
to have forgotten the Lysenko affair. That was the twentieth century’s
most notorious instance of the scandal—and tragedy—of politically
correct science. By stacking the deck in favor of a manufactured
“consensus” over the still-contested issue of man-made global warming,
the Pontifical Academy of Sciences risks comparison with the
ideologically driven postures of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in
the Soviet Union during the Stalin era.
Marxism thought itself to have progressed from Utopia to science.
Environmentalism makes a corresponding claim for itself. Both are
scaffolds for authoritarian controls and for subordinating science to
the advocacy needs of politics.
Let me leave the last word with Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel
Prize-winning Stanford University physicist and former research
scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: “Please remain
calm: The Earth will heal itself. Climate is beyond our power to
control. . . . Earth doesn’t care about governments or their
legislation. You can’t find much actual global warming in present-day
weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time,
something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking
anyone’s permission or explaining itself.”
