The author, John O’Keefe, Ph.D., stands outside the Holy Family Shrine, a Catholic chapel located off the interstate near Omaha. Sitting atop a hillside, the chapel offers a sweeping view of the surrounding countryside and provides visitors a quiet place to pray and reconnect with nature.
The Catholic Church and the Environment
By John J. O’Keefe, Ph.D.
Professor of Theology and
A.F. Jacobson Chair in Communications
In 2007, the Vatican announced that it would try to become carbon neutral by participating in a Hungarian reforestation effort and by obtaining some of its energy from renewable sources. Making good on the promise, solar panels were installed on the roof of the Paul VI audience hall last year, and more projects are planned. These are but two examples of a new “green” turn in the Roman Catholic Church that began — slowly — during the pontificate of John Paul II and that has been gaining momentum since the election of Benedict XVI. This new environmental consciousness, however, is bigger than papal leadership. Bishops, theologians and other Catholic commentators have been writing and speaking about environmental issues in a steadily increasing crescendo since the 1980s. The collection of these voices now makes it clear that the words “Catholic” and “environmentalist” are not mutually exclusive.
This new partnership between Church and planet may come as a surprise to those who have labored long in the environmental movement. Since 1967, when the late Lynn White, a professor of medieval history at Princeton, Stanford and UCLA, had his influential article “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” published in the journal Science, many environmental activists have tended to think that the teachings of the Christian Church are a major cause of the world’s current environmental malaise. According to White, and many others since, the problem goes back to the book of Genesis, the first chapter in fact. Having just described the creation of the earth, animals and plants, the sacred author turns to the creation of human beings. Verses 26-30 provide the critical text:
(26) Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground.” (27) God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them. (28) God blessed them, saying: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and all the living things that move on the earth.” (29) God also said: “See, I give you every seedbearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; (30) and to all the animals of the land, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the ground, I give all the green plants for food.”
For Christianity’s critics, the presence of the words “dominion” and “subdue” at the very beginning of the creation narrative sets the tone for all subsequent Christian attitudes toward nature. Now, millennia later, the full impact of this misguided teaching — again, according to the critics — lies before us in the ecological devastation of the planet that we are now experiencing.
On the one hand, the critics are easily silenced. Looking around the world at countries that have not been heavily influenced by Christianity, such as China or India, we see enormous environmental problems. It is clearly simplistic to locate the cause of all environmental challenges facing the planet in one ancient text and in one world religion. Likewise, as Roger Gottlieb explains in his recent book A Greener Faith (Oxford, 2006), all of the major world religions have only lately begun to engage in serious reflection about the environment. Thus, singling out Christianity as uniquely inattentive makes little sense. On the other hand, criticism can help the one criticized achieve greater clarity. This has certainly been the case for emerging Catholic teaching about the environment.
Founding Pillar: ‘A Renewal of the Doctrine of Creation’
A founding pillar of this emerging teaching is what Pope Benedict XVI has called “a renewal of the doctrine of creation.” In August 2008, while addressing a group of Italian clergy, the pope wrote that “the brutal consumption of creation begins where God is not, where matter is henceforth only material for us, where we ourselves are the ultimate demand, where the whole is merely our property and we consume it for ourselves alone.” In this same address, the pope also urged the audience to remember that “true and effective initiatives to prevent the waste and destruction of creation can be implemented and developed, understood and lived, only where creation is considered as beginning with God.”
The return to the doctrine of creation has been a necessary first step in building up a more forceful Catholic teaching about the environment. Although the making of human beings is presented as a high point in God’s work of creating, the creation narrative in the book of Genesis is not exclusively interested in human beings. Instead, the sacred author emphasizes how “good” the rest of the creation is in the eyes of God. The earth and everything on it comes from God and belongs to God. It does not belong to human beings. Echoing this sense of God’s dominion over the creation, the psalmist exclaimed, “the Lord’s are the earth and its fullness, the world and those who dwell in it.” (Ps. 24:1) With this in mind, the mandate given to humans to “subdue the earth” and have “dominion” should not be read as an isolated scriptural fragment. Instead, it needs to be interpreted within the larger teaching that creation belongs to God. Understood in this way, we can see that these texts ask humans to be careful stewards of creation rather than pillagers of it.
Second Pillar: Sacramental Tradition
A second pillar of emerging Catholic teaching about the environment comes from the sacramental tradition. For most Catholics, the word “sacrament” evokes the seven major sacraments of the Church — Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Reconciliation, Anointing, Marriage and Holy Orders. Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), however, the Church has recovered the more ancient meaning of sacrament as “mystery” (Latin “sacramentum” translates the Greek “mysterion”). Rather than focusing exclusively on the seven sacraments as isolated moments of grace — something like divine inoculations — Catholic teaching since the Council has emphasized that sacrament, in its broadest application, refers to the ability of creation to mediate the presence of God to us.
To quote the psalmist once more, “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 19:2). Thus, in the seven sacraments water, bread, wine, oil and the laying on of hands are all capable of mediating the divine presence to us. Likewise, the earth, itself, and all that is “good” upon it can function as a kind of giant sacrament, a revelation of God.
The recovery of this wider view of sacrament serves two purposes in emerging Catholic environmental teaching. First, it encourages the cultivation of a deeper reverence for the world that God has made. This is especially welcome in an age where people are increasingly estranged from the earth that sustains them. Many of us live much of our lives in a virtual world generated by the Internet and in environments far removed from natural processes. Remembering the sacramental nature of the creation is an invitation to encounter it more directly and to care for it more intentionally. Second, it reminds us that we actually need creation to encounter God at all. Human beings are animals. We are “earthlings.” We are a part of creation, and we cannot live apart from it. The creation is not one way in which we might electively encounter God. Instead, we need to grasp that the creation provides the only way for us to encounter God. To the extent that we diminish our environment and treat it irreverently, we are engaging in a perverse snubbing of God’s gift to us.
Third Pillar: Ethical
The conviction that human beings must be good stewards of the creation to which they belong by God’s gift has strong and far-reaching ethical implications. The third pillar, then, of emerging Catholic teaching on the environment is ethical. It is one thing to say that we must recover a reverence for the earth and quite another to say, exactly, what manner of life we should adopt in order to accomplish this.
In June 2008, Pope Benedict declared to the youth of the world, “My dear friends, God’s creation is one and it is good. The concerns for nonviolence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment are of vital importance for humanity.” In linking nonviolence, justice and peace to sustainable environmental practice, the pope was referencing a significant expansion in Catholic social teaching that is currently under way.
From the first generation of the Church, concern for the poor and disenfranchised has been a hallmark of Christian ethics. However, since the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter Rerum Novarum in 1891, these ethical concerns have evolved into a highly sophisticated set of teachings about the nature of a just society. These teachings include reflection on human rights, the death penalty, the distribution of property, and just war, to mention a few.
However, until recently, they have not included any systematic reflection on our responsibility toward creation. This is now changing, and more and more Catholic theologians, ethicists and ecclesiastical leaders have recognized that the Church’s social teaching is the best venue for sustained reflection on the ethical implications of our growing environmental consciousness.
On the one hand, this expanded vision remains human-centered. We now realize that environmental devastation impacts the world’s poor disproportionately. Deforestation, water pollution and toxic emissions from unregulated industry contribute to intense human suffering all over the world. We cannot, then, talk about the unjust conditions that conspire to oppress the poor of the world only in terms of politics and economics; we are now compelled to consider environmental problems as well.
On the other hand, the expanded Catholic social teaching has begun to recognize that the human-centered vision is not, by itself, sufficient. We are increasingly recognizing that the earth, itself, and all of the creatures on it have rights of their own.
This does not mean, as some radical thinkers have suggested, that, say, a puppy and a human baby have equal rights, but it does mean that the puppy is not just our property, to be treated however we please. Just as it is sinful and unacceptable to abuse and mistreat the poor and to ignore the societal conditions that keep people poor, so also is it sinful and unacceptable to mistreat the earth and to ignore the societal conditions that conspire to degrade and destroy it.
For many years, the Church has spoken of the need for us to make an “option for the poor.” Put simply, this means that when we are faced with a decision about a particular course of action, we need to ask ourselves, how will this impact the weakest members of the human community and then act accordingly. Following this model, some Catholic environmental thinkers are calling for the addition of an “option for the earth,” where we stop and think about how our decisions — what I am about to do, what I am about to buy, where I am about to live and what I am about to eat — will impact the environment that sustains us all and then act accordingly.
A Growing Environmental Consciousness
These are extraordinarily complicated times. Indeed, the more we become aware of the depth of the environmental challenges before us, the more daunting they can seem. It is, however, certain that the Catholic community worldwide is experiencing a growing environmental consciousness. We can see this very clearly in the teachings of Pope Benedict, and we are seeing it with increasing frequency in the writings of theologians and bishops. For example, reflecting on the critical problem of climate change, the U.S. Bishops wrote that “at its core, global climate change is not about economic theory or political platforms, nor about partisan advantage or interest group pressures. It is about the future of God’s creation and the one human family.”
All citizens of the earth should be sobered by the environmental problems we face. But we need not despair. The launching of the “Catholic Climate Covenant” in April 2009 is one sign of a building momentum for environmental action within the Catholic community, but there are many more. With its reverence for creation, its sacramental vision and its social teaching, the Catholic tradition has much to offer the world as it struggles toward a more sustainable future.
Creighton Joins Jesuit Institutions in Campaign to Reduce Climate Change
Creighton University is among the more than 70 Jesuit schools, parishes, communities and organizations across the nation committing themselves to an unprecedented campaign to help reduce climate change, which disproportionately impacts the poor and vulnerable. As part of the Ignatian PeaceAction, students from Jesuit schools, parishioners from Jesuit churches and Jesuit communities have committed to pray and act on climate change issues with a particular emphasis on mitigating the negative effects of climate change on the poor. With the theme “Peace with Creation,” this year’s Ignatian PeaceAction supports and promotes the St. Francis Covenant to Protect Creation and the Poor, sponsored by the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change. You can find the St. Francis Pledge at http://catholicclimatecovenant.org/the-st-francis-pledge/.
Center for Catholic Thought
The Center for Catholic Thought at Creighton University was created in 2009. The Center serves students, faculty and the local Catholic community through a series of programs designed to explore and promote the Church’s intellectual tradition. The Catholic Church has a long history of engaging the intersection of faith and reason. Catholic Universities are especially well positioned to become intentional centers of excellence where the Catholic intellectual tradition is able to prosper and thrive. For more information on how you can support this initiative, contact the Office of Development at 800.334.8794.
Creighton Dining Halls Skip Trays
Creighton University’s dining halls no longer offer the traditional cafeteria trays. Instead, students bring their food to the table one plate at a time. The goal of the “trayless” initiative is to reduce food waste — with side benefits of reducing water and chemical usage associated with washing the trays. It’s just one of the green initiatives taking root at Creighton. For more on Creighton’s sustainability efforts, visit www2.creighton.edu/about/sustainability .
By John J. O’Keefe, Ph.D.
Professor of Theology and
A.F. Jacobson Chair in Communications
In 2007, the Vatican announced that it would try to become carbon neutral by participating in a Hungarian reforestation effort and by obtaining some of its energy from renewable sources. Making good on the promise, solar panels were installed on the roof of the Paul VI audience hall last year, and more projects are planned. These are but two examples of a new “green” turn in the Roman Catholic Church that began — slowly — during the pontificate of John Paul II and that has been gaining momentum since the election of Benedict XVI. This new environmental consciousness, however, is bigger than papal leadership. Bishops, theologians and other Catholic commentators have been writing and speaking about environmental issues in a steadily increasing crescendo since the 1980s. The collection of these voices now makes it clear that the words “Catholic” and “environmentalist” are not mutually exclusive.
This new partnership between Church and planet may come as a surprise to those who have labored long in the environmental movement. Since 1967, when the late Lynn White, a professor of medieval history at Princeton, Stanford and UCLA, had his influential article “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” published in the journal Science, many environmental activists have tended to think that the teachings of the Christian Church are a major cause of the world’s current environmental malaise. According to White, and many others since, the problem goes back to the book of Genesis, the first chapter in fact. Having just described the creation of the earth, animals and plants, the sacred author turns to the creation of human beings. Verses 26-30 provide the critical text:
(26) Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground.” (27) God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them. (28) God blessed them, saying: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and all the living things that move on the earth.” (29) God also said: “See, I give you every seedbearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; (30) and to all the animals of the land, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the ground, I give all the green plants for food.”
For Christianity’s critics, the presence of the words “dominion” and “subdue” at the very beginning of the creation narrative sets the tone for all subsequent Christian attitudes toward nature. Now, millennia later, the full impact of this misguided teaching — again, according to the critics — lies before us in the ecological devastation of the planet that we are now experiencing.
On the one hand, the critics are easily silenced. Looking around the world at countries that have not been heavily influenced by Christianity, such as China or India, we see enormous environmental problems. It is clearly simplistic to locate the cause of all environmental challenges facing the planet in one ancient text and in one world religion. Likewise, as Roger Gottlieb explains in his recent book A Greener Faith (Oxford, 2006), all of the major world religions have only lately begun to engage in serious reflection about the environment. Thus, singling out Christianity as uniquely inattentive makes little sense. On the other hand, criticism can help the one criticized achieve greater clarity. This has certainly been the case for emerging Catholic teaching about the environment.
Founding Pillar: ‘A Renewal of the Doctrine of Creation’
A founding pillar of this emerging teaching is what Pope Benedict XVI has called “a renewal of the doctrine of creation.” In August 2008, while addressing a group of Italian clergy, the pope wrote that “the brutal consumption of creation begins where God is not, where matter is henceforth only material for us, where we ourselves are the ultimate demand, where the whole is merely our property and we consume it for ourselves alone.” In this same address, the pope also urged the audience to remember that “true and effective initiatives to prevent the waste and destruction of creation can be implemented and developed, understood and lived, only where creation is considered as beginning with God.”
The return to the doctrine of creation has been a necessary first step in building up a more forceful Catholic teaching about the environment. Although the making of human beings is presented as a high point in God’s work of creating, the creation narrative in the book of Genesis is not exclusively interested in human beings. Instead, the sacred author emphasizes how “good” the rest of the creation is in the eyes of God. The earth and everything on it comes from God and belongs to God. It does not belong to human beings. Echoing this sense of God’s dominion over the creation, the psalmist exclaimed, “the Lord’s are the earth and its fullness, the world and those who dwell in it.” (Ps. 24:1) With this in mind, the mandate given to humans to “subdue the earth” and have “dominion” should not be read as an isolated scriptural fragment. Instead, it needs to be interpreted within the larger teaching that creation belongs to God. Understood in this way, we can see that these texts ask humans to be careful stewards of creation rather than pillagers of it.
Second Pillar: Sacramental Tradition
A second pillar of emerging Catholic teaching about the environment comes from the sacramental tradition. For most Catholics, the word “sacrament” evokes the seven major sacraments of the Church — Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Reconciliation, Anointing, Marriage and Holy Orders. Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), however, the Church has recovered the more ancient meaning of sacrament as “mystery” (Latin “sacramentum” translates the Greek “mysterion”). Rather than focusing exclusively on the seven sacraments as isolated moments of grace — something like divine inoculations — Catholic teaching since the Council has emphasized that sacrament, in its broadest application, refers to the ability of creation to mediate the presence of God to us.
To quote the psalmist once more, “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 19:2). Thus, in the seven sacraments water, bread, wine, oil and the laying on of hands are all capable of mediating the divine presence to us. Likewise, the earth, itself, and all that is “good” upon it can function as a kind of giant sacrament, a revelation of God.
The recovery of this wider view of sacrament serves two purposes in emerging Catholic environmental teaching. First, it encourages the cultivation of a deeper reverence for the world that God has made. This is especially welcome in an age where people are increasingly estranged from the earth that sustains them. Many of us live much of our lives in a virtual world generated by the Internet and in environments far removed from natural processes. Remembering the sacramental nature of the creation is an invitation to encounter it more directly and to care for it more intentionally. Second, it reminds us that we actually need creation to encounter God at all. Human beings are animals. We are “earthlings.” We are a part of creation, and we cannot live apart from it. The creation is not one way in which we might electively encounter God. Instead, we need to grasp that the creation provides the only way for us to encounter God. To the extent that we diminish our environment and treat it irreverently, we are engaging in a perverse snubbing of God’s gift to us.
Third Pillar: Ethical
The conviction that human beings must be good stewards of the creation to which they belong by God’s gift has strong and far-reaching ethical implications. The third pillar, then, of emerging Catholic teaching on the environment is ethical. It is one thing to say that we must recover a reverence for the earth and quite another to say, exactly, what manner of life we should adopt in order to accomplish this.
In June 2008, Pope Benedict declared to the youth of the world, “My dear friends, God’s creation is one and it is good. The concerns for nonviolence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment are of vital importance for humanity.” In linking nonviolence, justice and peace to sustainable environmental practice, the pope was referencing a significant expansion in Catholic social teaching that is currently under way.
From the first generation of the Church, concern for the poor and disenfranchised has been a hallmark of Christian ethics. However, since the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter Rerum Novarum in 1891, these ethical concerns have evolved into a highly sophisticated set of teachings about the nature of a just society. These teachings include reflection on human rights, the death penalty, the distribution of property, and just war, to mention a few.
However, until recently, they have not included any systematic reflection on our responsibility toward creation. This is now changing, and more and more Catholic theologians, ethicists and ecclesiastical leaders have recognized that the Church’s social teaching is the best venue for sustained reflection on the ethical implications of our growing environmental consciousness.
On the one hand, this expanded vision remains human-centered. We now realize that environmental devastation impacts the world’s poor disproportionately. Deforestation, water pollution and toxic emissions from unregulated industry contribute to intense human suffering all over the world. We cannot, then, talk about the unjust conditions that conspire to oppress the poor of the world only in terms of politics and economics; we are now compelled to consider environmental problems as well.
On the other hand, the expanded Catholic social teaching has begun to recognize that the human-centered vision is not, by itself, sufficient. We are increasingly recognizing that the earth, itself, and all of the creatures on it have rights of their own.
This does not mean, as some radical thinkers have suggested, that, say, a puppy and a human baby have equal rights, but it does mean that the puppy is not just our property, to be treated however we please. Just as it is sinful and unacceptable to abuse and mistreat the poor and to ignore the societal conditions that keep people poor, so also is it sinful and unacceptable to mistreat the earth and to ignore the societal conditions that conspire to degrade and destroy it.
For many years, the Church has spoken of the need for us to make an “option for the poor.” Put simply, this means that when we are faced with a decision about a particular course of action, we need to ask ourselves, how will this impact the weakest members of the human community and then act accordingly. Following this model, some Catholic environmental thinkers are calling for the addition of an “option for the earth,” where we stop and think about how our decisions — what I am about to do, what I am about to buy, where I am about to live and what I am about to eat — will impact the environment that sustains us all and then act accordingly.
A Growing Environmental Consciousness
These are extraordinarily complicated times. Indeed, the more we become aware of the depth of the environmental challenges before us, the more daunting they can seem. It is, however, certain that the Catholic community worldwide is experiencing a growing environmental consciousness. We can see this very clearly in the teachings of Pope Benedict, and we are seeing it with increasing frequency in the writings of theologians and bishops. For example, reflecting on the critical problem of climate change, the U.S. Bishops wrote that “at its core, global climate change is not about economic theory or political platforms, nor about partisan advantage or interest group pressures. It is about the future of God’s creation and the one human family.”
All citizens of the earth should be sobered by the environmental problems we face. But we need not despair. The launching of the “Catholic Climate Covenant” in April 2009 is one sign of a building momentum for environmental action within the Catholic community, but there are many more. With its reverence for creation, its sacramental vision and its social teaching, the Catholic tradition has much to offer the world as it struggles toward a more sustainable future.
Creighton Joins Jesuit Institutions in Campaign to Reduce Climate Change
Creighton University is among the more than 70 Jesuit schools, parishes, communities and organizations across the nation committing themselves to an unprecedented campaign to help reduce climate change, which disproportionately impacts the poor and vulnerable. As part of the Ignatian PeaceAction, students from Jesuit schools, parishioners from Jesuit churches and Jesuit communities have committed to pray and act on climate change issues with a particular emphasis on mitigating the negative effects of climate change on the poor. With the theme “Peace with Creation,” this year’s Ignatian PeaceAction supports and promotes the St. Francis Covenant to Protect Creation and the Poor, sponsored by the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change. You can find the St. Francis Pledge at http://catholicclimatecovenant.org/the-st-francis-pledge/.
Center for Catholic Thought
The Center for Catholic Thought at Creighton University was created in 2009. The Center serves students, faculty and the local Catholic community through a series of programs designed to explore and promote the Church’s intellectual tradition. The Catholic Church has a long history of engaging the intersection of faith and reason. Catholic Universities are especially well positioned to become intentional centers of excellence where the Catholic intellectual tradition is able to prosper and thrive. For more information on how you can support this initiative, contact the Office of Development at 800.334.8794.
Creighton Dining Halls Skip Trays
Creighton University’s dining halls no longer offer the traditional cafeteria trays. Instead, students bring their food to the table one plate at a time. The goal of the “trayless” initiative is to reduce food waste — with side benefits of reducing water and chemical usage associated with washing the trays. It’s just one of the green initiatives taking root at Creighton. For more on Creighton’s sustainability efforts, visit www2.creighton.edu/about/sustainability .
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Note: Bolds and Highlights added to emphasize the propaganda.
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