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Cover
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Restoring the sacred in nature
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
NCR Staff Portland, Ore. -- Photos by Mike
Penney
In a new pastoral letter on the
Columbia River and its resources, U.S. and Canadian bishops take a dramatic
step forward in the churchs engagement in the environmental movement by
recognizing for the first time in an official church document that nature,
along with human beings, has rights.
The 66-page letter, scheduled to be completed by next year,
plunges the bishops into a highly polarized fray in the Pacific Northwest and
southwestern Canada over a host of environmental issues in the region.
Billed as a reflection in its present stage, the
letter evokes the majesty of the Columbia River and the romance of an area
filled with natural beauty, even as it underscores the areas decidedly
unromantic environmental, political and social problems. Those include the
precipitous decline of the salmon population and the related cultural wars
among Native Americans, farmers and representatives of a variety of commercial
interests; the familiar sight of once-towering trees stripped and strapped to
logging trucks; the high price tag related to nuclear and industrial waste that
has put some of the nations worst pollution in one of its least developed
regions. The watershed has become a battleground for competing interests.
The first draft of the letter was presented in mid-May to a group
of scholars from around the nation -- mostly from Catholic colleges and
universities -- who are working in environmental studies and theology. The
scholars, participants in a conference at the University of Portland, generally
agreed that U.S. Catholics, for a variety of reasons, lag well behind many
other groups, including their mainline Protestant counterparts, in developing
an environmental theology. The conference was titled Linking
Environmental Studies, Theology and Science: A 21st-Century Challenge for
Catholic Colleges and Universities.
Left: A barge travels throught the gorge area on the Columbia
River, 40 miles east of Portland, Ore. Center: Nuclear waste containers from
submarine reactors are stored at the Hanford site in Washington. Right: A
Native American fishing platform (foreground) stands opposite The Dales Dam in
Oregon.
Theology has isolated itself from reality, charged
Gene Wilhelm of Slippery Rock, Pa., who represented the Earth Literacy Network.
As a result, he said, Catholic universities are not responding effectively to
the environmental crisis.
What is most significant about the new pastoral letter, according
to John Hart, a theology professor who is deeply involved in the project, is
that the bishops define the common good in a much broader sense than any
pastoral letter has done before. Instead of talking about the common good
in social, legal and political terms, the bishops use the term to refer to both
people and other members of the community of life, that is, to the
totality of life on earth, Hart said in an interview.
The letter, based on extensive listening sessions
throughout the region, marks the first time the bishops have made that
extension, said Hart, who teaches theology and also directs the
environmental studies program at Carroll College, Helena, Mont. Hart was the
full-time director of a previous regional bishops project, development of
the 1980 pastoral letter, Strangers and Guests, about agricultural
issues in the Midwest.
Unveiled to the public via the Internet on May 12, the
bishops letter calls for a sacramental understanding of the watershed and
justice for all its inhabitants -- persons, animals and plants -- and
development of a spiritual relationship to the river. We must allow the
watershed to speak to us of God and, where we as a people have so altered it as
to silence its teachings, we must restore its voice, the bishops
write.
If in official Catholic circles, the color green has long served
mainly to signal the liturgical period known as ordinary time,
gradually, scholars at the conference said, green is beginning to penetrate the
Catholic consciousness as a symbol of the environmental movement.
Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., head of the steering
committee for the pastoral letter project, told participants during a morning
prayer service, Nature has an integrity all its own, apart from human
beings. He called for recovery of the aesthetic, sacramental and
spiritual appreciation of creation and an integration of religious
values into the environmental debate. The eve of the millennium, Skylstad
said, is one of those crisis moments in human history ... a crossroads in
time when we must make critical decisions and bring moral
order to the public debate in ecology.
Surprising new direction
Several scholars at the conference said they were pleasantly
surprised at the forward, even ground-breaking, direction of Skylstads
remarks in its emphasis on the sacramentality and integrity of nature.
There are so many issues. The crunch is obvious here,
said Dieter Hessel of Princeton, N.J., speaking of the Pacific Northwest.
Hessel, a Presbyterian who directs two programs that link ecology and theology,
added: Very few Catholic schools and very few seminaries, if any, are
focused on this. Most environmental studies have been in secular settings.
Catholics are catching up. But theyll do it differently. Thats the
important thing to know.
Hart points out that the letter is the first to be developed by
bishops of two countries -- the bishops of the Pacific Northwest in the United
States and British Columbia in Canada -- highlighting another key environmental
understanding. Effectively, Hart said, the bishops are saying
that national borders are really artificial in terms of who we are, that the
environment is a totality ... that we are united beyond our national
identities.
One third of the 1,200-mile-long Columbia River is in Canada.
For Christians generally, and especially for Christian
fundamentalists, one of the obstacles to engagement with ecological concerns
has been the verse in Genesis that authorizes human beings to fill the
earth and subdue it and have dominion over ... every living thing.
Historian Lynn White put the blame for the worlds
environmental problems squarely at Christianitys feet in an often-cited
article published in Science magazine in 1967. In the article, The
Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, White asserted that a marriage
between a human-centered Christian theology deriving from the Middle Ages and
Western expansionist goals had produced a ruthless attitude toward nature.
For Catholics today, Fr. Kevin W. Irwin, theology professor at The
Catholic University of America, finds theological fundamentalism -- holding
fast to familiar theological approaches and formulas -- to be a bigger obstacle
than biblical fundamentalism to developing a new environmental theology.
Theological fundamentalists refuse to grapple with the new questions that
force theology to grow. They fail to reflect the breadth of the
tradition, he said.
In contrast to the historic human-centered focus of Christian
theology, an adequate theology of the environment understands justice, not only
in human terms but of and for the whole earth, he said.
In another talk, Jame Schaefer, who teaches theology at Marquette
University, gave examples of patristic and medieval writings that provide new
resources for a Catholic environmental theology: the writings of Basil of
Caesarea, of Augustine, of Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi, for
example. We really have a treasure house in our tradition, she
said.
Hessel said that a lot of thinking is also going on around the
question of the green core; that is, the core disciplines for
environmental studies. Recognition is growing, he said, that it needs to
include not only science but economics, sociology, political science and other
disciplines that get at the political issues swirling around
environmental questions. Theres a much broader meaning to the word
green than meets the casual eye, Hessel said.
Target the business
schools
If you want to have an impact on the future, you should
target the business schools, not the theology departments, said Jesuit
Fr. David Toolan, associate editor of America magazine. Other scholars
noted that architecture and engineering have roles to play.
There are reasons beyond theological fundamentalism
that Catholics lag behind the secular world and even the rest of the Christian
world when it comes to concern for the environment.
The population question is the Achilles heel of
Catholics when it comes to the environmental movement, said William
Dinges, associate professor of religion and religious education at The Catholic
University of America and one of 22 professors engaged in Life Cycle Institute
research there. Theres a fear of public discussion of that issue.
In some ways, it damages the churchs credibility in relation to the
environmental movement.
Dinges spoke as a group of conference participants rode in a van
to the Sandy River gorge, headed for a hike along a muddy trail through a
forest of old-growth Douglas fir. Because of extensive logging, this is one of
few remnants of old-growth forest still standing at low elevations, according
to conservationist Eddie Huckins, who served as guide. Along the way, Huckins,
an expert in the regions ecology, recited a favorite Native American
saying: I am the land, the land is me. What happens to the land happens
to me.
In an earlier conference session, Dinges had proposed several
other reasons why Catholics lag behind other groups in environmental awareness.
Among them:
- A population that has entered the middle class and is
very involved in the consumptive culture;
- a large Hispanic population that tends to view the
environmental movement as the province of the establishment;
- an increasingly privatized religion in America, so that even
if people profess a religion, they are increasingly less likely to act in its
name, making it harder for Catholics to mobilize around issues;
- lack of support from priests and lack of environmental studies
in seminaries. If its not there, its not going to get into
the parishes, Dinges said.
Patrick Allitt, a historian from Emory University and author of an
article titled American Catholics and the Environment, 1960-1995
published in the April 1998 issue of Catholic Historical Review, also
gave historical reasons for the lag. Among them:
- Focus on other issues when the environmental movement was
getting its start at the end of the 1960s -- issues like the fallout from
Vatican II, the civil rights movement, ecumenism and the beginning of
liberation theology, and in the early 1970s, the aftermath of Roe v.
Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion;
- the Catholic churchs human-centered theology and, as a
result, its focus on such issues as poverty, the capitalist economy and the
military-industrial complex;
- the urban, industrial base of the Catholic population,
promoting fears that environmental legislation would threaten jobs.
One strand of the environmental movement says that you have
to take more seriously the issues of other species. Catholics are very
resistant to that, Allitt said.
Toolan said its time for Catholics to move beyond that
resistance. Something so huge has happened the last 50 years on this
front that we havent yet absorbed the implications, he said. The
irony, he said, is that even as human beings recognize that we are only a part
of nature, we are increasingly in control of the planet, either by
commission or omission. We can create either a sign of promise, a sacramental
world that expresses Gods love to all creatures or we can create a horror
show.
An ecological reformation
Most Catholic parishes -- most Protestant parishes -- are
not engaged, but were starting to get more attention, Hessel said.
Were at the front end of an ecological reformation. The eco-justice
crisis, the link between environmental degradation and social injustice
worldwide, will be the paramount problem of the 21st century.
John E. Carroll of the University of New Hampshire argued that
Catholics have a stronger presence in the environmental movement, albeit
quietly, than is generally known. Carroll is coeditor of Embracing Earth:
Catholic Approaches to Ecology (Orbis 1994) and editor of Ecology and
Religion: Scientists Speak (Franciscan Press, 1998). Further, he said, the
Catholic tradition is rich with resources, boding well for future scholarly
work.
Few priests have engaged ecological issues, Carroll said,
but its all there in the central tradition. We only need to pull it
out and convince skeptics that there is real substance to all of
this.
We have the potential to become the storytellers of a new
day, said Dominican Sr. Carol Dempsey, assistant theology professor at
the University of Portland and a biblical scholar. No longer can we speak
only of social justice. We need a new ethical paradigm that speaks of care for
all creation.
Monika Hellwig, executive director of the American Association of
Colleges and Universities, laid out some scholarly objectives for the work
ahead. Among them is the major task of growing in our understanding of the
different ways that faith and science construe and interpret
reality.
We are conscious of the way that science transforms our
universe, but we are less conscious of the way faith transforms it, she
said. Hellwig said the task of integrating faith and science gets harder as
scholars become increasingly specialized.
The conference was cosponsored by the university and the
environmental justice office of the U.S. Catholic Conference, the social action
arm of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Walter Grazer, director of the office, said, Our goal is to
move this issue out of the bishops conference and into the Catholic
colleges and universities, so this is a great step forward. His office,
created just six years ago, has granted several hundred thousand dollars, he
said, to parishes and dioceses for projects related to environmental
issues.
Although activity on the environmental front is growing among U.S.
Catholic leaders and new thinking is emerging, the concerns arent
entirely new. There have been markers throughout history, Grazer
said. In the United States, for instance, the Catholic Rural Life
Conference has always attended to questions of agriculture and the
environment. The pastoral letter on the Columbia River cites seven
previous documents by U.S. and Canadian church leaders and Pope John Paul
II.
The new pastoral letter is another important step, he said,
because it provides a vision and gives legitimacy to
the environmental movement. A lot of people are looking for that,
he said. They want the pope and the bishops to say its OK to be
about this work.
National Catholic Reporter, June 4,
1999
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