Anxiety has gripped US conservatives over Pope Francis’ upcoming encyclical on the environment. So much so that you might think a pope had never before blamed fossil fuels for global warming. Or accused energy companies of hoarding the Earth’s resources at the expense of the poor. Or urged the rich to consume less and share more.
However, several of Francis’ immediate predecessors have done just that, inspired by the Bible itself — raising the question of what all the fuss is about. Why would US Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, a devout Catholic who says he loves the pope, urge Francis to “leave science to the scientists” and stop talking about global warming? Why would conservative Catholic commentators attack the Vatican for hosting the UN secretary-general at a climate conference?
It turns out that environmental issues are particularly vexing for the Catholic Church, especially in the US. They carry implications for big business, which often has ties to wealthy Catholics, as well as for the world’s growing population, which brings up questions of birth control. For the religious right, the Vatican’s endorsement of the UN alarm about global warming amounts to an endorsement of the UN agenda to give women access to contraception and abortion.
Illustration: Yusha
How Francis deals with population growth as it affects the environment is one of the key questions that is set to be answered when the encyclical is released on Thursday.
Despite such divisive issues, popes in recent decades have not shied away from framing ecological concerns in moral terms, given that in the Bible itself God places mankind in the Garden of Eden with the explicit instructions to not only “till” the ground but to also “keep it.”
Recent popes have made clear that human activity is largely to blame for the environmental degradation that is threatening the Earth’s ecosystems. They have demanded urgent action by industrialized nations to change their ways and undergo an “ecological conversion” to prevent the poor from paying for the sins of the rich.
Some have even made their points in encyclicals, the most authoritative teaching document a pope can issue.
Take one of St John Paul II’s annual messages for the World Day of Peace: “The gradual depletion of the ozone layer and the related greenhouse effect has now reached crisis proportions as a consequence of industrial growth, massive urban concentrations and vastly increased energy needs,” John Paul wrote.
“Industrial waste, the burning of fossil fuels, unrestricted deforestation, the use of certain types of herbicides, coolants and propellant: All of these are known to harm the atmosphere and environment. The resulting meteorological and atmospheric changes range from damage to health to the possible future submersion of low-lying lands,” he added.
The year was 1990, a quarter of a century ago.
Before him there was pope Paul VI. In his 1967 encyclical, Popularum Progresso (Development of Peoples), Paul wrote that while creation is for man to use, the goods of the Earth are meant to be shared by all, not just the rich.
“No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life,” Paul wrote nearly a half-century ago.
There was also pope Benedict XVI, dubbed the “green pope” because he took concrete action to back up his strong ecological calls: Under his watch, the Vatican installed photovoltaic cells on the roof of its main auditorium, a solar cooling unit for its main cafeteria and joined a reforestation project aimed at offsetting its carbon emissions.
“The fact that some states, power groups and energy companies hoard non-renewable energy resources represents a grave obstacle to development in poor countries,” Benedict wrote in his 2009 encyclical Charity in Truth. “The international community has an urgent duty to find institutional means of regulating the exploitation of non-renewable resources, involving poor countries in the process, in order to plan together for the future.”
In that encyclical, however, the German theologian addressed the population issue by denouncing mandatory birth control policies and noting that even populous countries have emerged from poverty thanks to the talents of their people, not their numbers.
At the same time, though, he stressed “responsible procreation” — a theme Francis is likely to take up himself given that he has already said Catholics need not reproduce “like rabbits.”
So what is so new about Francis’ encyclical?
First, no pope has dedicated an entire encyclical to ecological concerns. In addition no pope has cited the findings of the UN International Panel on Climate Change in a major document, as Francis is expected to do. Francis, history’s first Latin American pope, would also be bringing the point of view of the “Global South” to a social teaching document of the church, which is in itself new.
However, on the whole, the church’s environmental message has been articulated for years, though it has gotten lost in other issues.
“To be honest, we have been talking about this but not with enough emphasis,” said Reverend Agostino Zampini Davies, the Argentine theological adviser to the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, the development agency of the Catholic Church of England and Wales.
Zampini Davies recently made a power-point presentation to the church’s global Caritas aid agencies outlining what each pope and bishops’ conference has said about the environment for the past half-century, a remarkable compilation that could have saved Francis’ ghost-writers time and effort in drafting the encyclical.
Zampini noted that the 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, a massive undertaking by the Vatican to put all the church’s social teachings in one book, gave scant attention to the environment — “a missed opportunity” Zampini Davies said that Francis is now correcting with an even more authoritative document.
Amid the alarm that Francis plans to go far beyond what past popes have said, US Cardinal Donald Wuerl recently addressed a conference of business and church leaders on how sustainable actions can drive the economic growth needed to lift people out of poverty.
“The teaching of Pope Francis and his efforts to address the environment are in harmony with those of his predecessors,” he said.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs