Francis moving Church from pale green to deep green

20 January 2015

There is one area where the last three popes have been right on the ball: the issue of care for the environment. John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis have been far ahead of most politicians on this issue.

It’s widely expected that Pope Francis will issue an encyclical on the environment and climate change early this year in time to influence the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in late 2015. He is already being hailed in the The Guardian, Bloomberg and Fairfax Media as ‘rattling’ and ‘upsetting’ Catholic climate change sceptics and politicians.

But Francis faces an enormous challenge to move beyond his predecessors and confront two core issues that have emerged in environmental theology. Because they failed to confront these issues, John Paul II and Benedict remained rather ‘pale green’ in their approach, under-estimating the magnitude and urgency of the environmental problems we face.

As a number of us writing in this area have pointed out for years now Christianity’s basic problem (and yes, this is not just a Catholic problem) is its ingrained anthropocentrism. To be anthropocentric is to be entirely focused on humankind and its needs and aspirations to the exclusion of all other species and priorities. It is the unconscious assumption that the earth exists for us and that its total meaning is derived from us.

Thomas Berry says that anthropocentrism is rooted in ‘our failure to think of ourselves as a species, interconnected with and biologically interdependent on the rest of reality.’ He says that we have become besotted with ‘the pathos of the human’ and take ourselves and our needs as the focus, norm, and final arbiter of all that exists.

Given that the cosmos has been here for about 14 billion years, earth for 4.6 billion years and life on earth for 3.8 billion years, if we are the sole meaning and purpose of the whole process then, as I said in the TV documentary God’s Earth, ‘God has been waiting an awfully long time for us to make sense of it all.’ As Irish priest-ecologist Sean McDonagh says, ‘God would not be waiting for homo sapiens to arrive about 200,000 years ago to give meaning to creation.’ In other words there is an emerging consensus among Catholics writing about the environment that the pale green, anthropocentric approach has had its day.

But there is another challenge lurking for Pope Francis’ new encyclical: the question

RELIGION

Francis moving Church from pale green to deep green

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