Catholic Environmentalism: Green Teachings, Initiatives Take Hold Among Catholics Worldwide

On his recent swing Down Under, Pope Benedict XVI garnered headlines for drawing a half-million pumped-up young Catholics to World Youth Day as well as for his latest bout of candor on the church’s sexual abuse crisis. Less noted was an important bit of subtext: the pope’s repeated calls for environmental protection.

In fact, environmentalism has emerged as perhaps the most distinctive new feature of Benedict XVI’s social teaching.

Benedict touched upon the environment seven times during his July 12-21 trip to Australia, more often than he mentioned sexual abuse, the right to life, relativism, or any other social or cultural concern.

This was hardly the first time a pope has struck an ecological note. As far back as 1972, Pope Paul VI called for “respect for the biosphere” to preserve “a hospitable earth for future generations.” Sacred Heart Sr. Marjorie Keenan, a longtime official of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said her shelves contain four volumes of papal teaching on the environment spanning four decades.

Nor was Benedict’s oratory particularly dramatic. This was not John Paul II in 2001, calling the world to “ecological conversion” in order to head off “catastrophe.” Instead, Benedict’s references were brief and never groundbreaking.

In retrospect, however, it’s that very ordinariness that seems remarkable. Benedict simply took for granted that his audience would recognize the environment as an object of legitimate Christian interest.

What the matter-of-fact tone reveals, in other words, is the extent to which Catholicism has “gone green.”

Walt Grazer, former head of the Environmental Justice Program for the U.S. bishops, said the change in Catholic attitudes has been dramatic.

“When I started in 1993, I was pretty lonely,” he said. “No one else worldwide seemed to be doing anything, so I knew pretty much everything that was going on.” Today, Grazer said, there’s such a blizzard of activism that no one can keep track of it all.

According to those who know the terrain, this environmental push is not primarily the result of ecclesiastical forces, but the realities of the surrounding world, especially growing scientific insights about the link between human activity and the environment. The push is expressing itself, they say, in a classically Catholic double pincer: top-down leadership intersecting with bottom-up energy.

These two forces aren’t always in sync, but something has shifted. Much as liberation theology’s “option for the poor” went from being perceived as avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s to being seen today, as Benedict XVI recently put it in Brazil, as “an intrinsic requirement of the Gospel,” so ecology has moved to the center of Catholicism’s social concern.