Just how radical a departure Pope Francis's encyclical is from the Roman Catholic tradition on the environment can be seen in a fascinating 'Letter from Rome' this week.
In the New Yorker, Naomi Klein, the Canadian activist whom Pope Francis invited to speak on the pope's encyclical, Laudato Si', recounted her experience as a real outsider coming to the Vatican.
However positive the reaction has been from world leaders to the pope's encyclical, she noted, it was hard not to notice the enormous resistance to change there still exists at the very heart of the institution the pope now leads:
Challenging anthropocentrism is ho-hum stuff for ecologists, but it’s something else for the pinnacle of the Catholic Church. You don’t get much more human-centered than the persistent Judeo-Christian interpretation that God created the entire world specifically to serve Adam’s every need. As for the idea that we are part of a family with all other living beings, with the earth as our life-giving mother, that too is familiar to eco-ears. But from the Church? Replacing a maternal Earth with a Father God, and draining the natural world of its sacred power, were what stamping out paganism and animism were all about.
It's still what it's all about for many in the Church, according to Klein.
By asserting that nature has a value in and of itself, Francis is overturning centuries of theological interpretation that regarded the natural world with outright hostility—as a misery to be transcended and an “allurement” to be resisted. Of course, there have been parts of Christianity that stressed that nature was something valuable to steward and protect—some even celebrated it—but mostly as a set of resources to sustain humans.
Klein would not have had to look very far to see just how sharply the pope's encyclical contrasts with the views of one of his historically recent predecessors.
Let's rewind the tape to 1941, when the future Pope Francis was but a child of five, and Pope Pius XII addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Do not marvel if, in front of you, you who have with so much acumen studied, researched, anatomised and compared man's brain with that of irrational animals, we exalt man whose face is bathed with that intelligence which is his exclusive inheritance. True science never lowers or humiliates man in his origins, rather it exalts and elevates him since it sees, compares and admires in each member of the human family the traces of the Divine Image.
The divide between humanity and nature here is stark, in the pope's words.
Man is truly great. The progress made by him in the physical and natural sciences, in pure and applied mathematics, render him even more eager to secure greater and more certain advances. What is this progress if not the effect of the domination, even if limited and won at great experience, which he still exercises over inferior nature? And has the past ever witnessed a greater study, scrutiny and penetration of nature than the present? A constant research so as to understand nature's forces and forms so as to be able to dominate them, subdue them with his instruments and then utilize them for his own benefit.
This speech by Pius XII is striking in its unapologetic assumption that the natural order is at humanity's disposal--and that science is the glorious tool by which humanity can improve its control over nature.
What's even more striking is that it comes right after a passage in the address in which the pope reiterates a very literalist understanding of man's direct creation by God, as it was recounted in the Bible.
It's not an accident that as the Catholic Church has been forced to acknowledge the expansion of our scientific understanding of the planet's evolutionary history--including humanity's evolutionary past--later popes, including John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have stuck a much less strident view about just how 'inferior' the rest of earthly creation is compared to humanity.
And correspondingly how much less prepared these popes were to view the earth as a resource to be dominated by humans.
Pope Francis has taken this one step further now. But as Klein points out, the traditional utilitarian attitude of Pius XII is still a very strong one within Catholicism.
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