Do you ever feel like the Church is divided into two or three eternally warring camps? The liberal, social justice Catholics – who love guitars and wavery-voiced, aging hippies in the choir and focus on immigration and blessing animals on the feast of St. Francis. The conservative, Catholic-radio Catholics who like choirs made up of mediocre pianists and Gospel-choir-robed grandmothers. They like reading pop-theologians and listening to podcasts about bringing adult children back to the faith. Then, there are the Traditionalists, like that drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, they’re always finding something new to get upset about. They like Gregorian chant, pounding organs, and nothing else.
Anywhere Catholics gather, these three camps can be found arguing with each other. Dismissing each other’s priorities, and wondering (whether privately or otherwise) if the other camp is “really Catholic.” It’s a mess. In some ways, it’s a lot like aunts at a family party, trading the same, slightly edited, recipe for whiskey sours and berating each other for “ruining it.” The recipe itself is fine – a little sweeter here, a little more sour there; “spirit-forward” when one makes it, a little bland when another mixes it up. The basics are still there, and throwing a freshly mixed sour in the sink (or in Aunt Emma’s face) is still a waste of good whiskey. But we never think about that in the moment, at the moment, it just tastes unfamiliar, different. No longer grandma’s recipe.
Laudato Si’
There are, of course, Right and Wrong ways to practice your faith. There are beliefs that are necessary to hold as a Catholic. There’s also an appropriate attitude toward liturgical music and another attitude that is less desirable, or even wrong. But, like the aunts and their whiskey sours, most of the things we fight about are more a matter of taste and preference. When Pope Francis published his encyclical Laudato Si’ in 2015, many conservative and traditional Catholics discounted it almost automatically. Despite being made up primarily of quotes from earlier popes and theologians about man’s responsibility to the environment, many Catholics in the midst of a culture war considered it an attack on their way of living their faith. Many devout Catholics avoided reading the pope’s encyclical because he had a reputation for heterodoxy and they felt justified in discounting his guidance.
But Laudato Si’ was an interesting and relevant encyclical. I remember reading it when it first came out and feeling encouraged and challenged – as a traditional Catholic – in my determination to build a life that considered the little acts of care important and treated “every purchase as a moral act.” Despite my many concerns about Pope Francis himself, I appreciated his perspective in Laudato Si’ and found its guidance valuable.
A Renewed Conversation
I was excited to discover, that this fall, under the new Pope Leo XIV, one of the Vatican theological commissions wrote a 29,000-word document building on the work of Pope Francis in Laudato Si’. This document, which has only been published in Italian so far, is titled Caring for Our Common Home: A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God. Because it’s only in Italian, I haven’t read the whole document. But, the selections I have seen have been hopeful, and I’m looking forward to its eventual translation into English.
The document is an attempt to renew the conversation about “ecological sin” and the duties of man toward nature in light of unprecedented ecological damage throughout the world. In many ways, this document appears to work towards a reclamation of the medieval sense of wonder and reverence for the natural world that began disintegrating during the Protestant Reformations of the late 15th and 16th centuries. The reformation and enlightenment attitudes towards work, nature, and man’s role in creation, which contributed a lot to the modern American work ethic, also shaped what the new document refers to as a “predatory,” human-centric view of nature.
Using guidance from Sts. Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, and Bonaventure, this new document attempts to develop a more balanced, and authentically Catholic approach to protecting our common home; one that understands man’s role as “both steward and servant” of creation.
The document focuses on man’s relationship to creation through his relationship to the Triune God. Emphasizing throughout its first three chapters that “all creation carries the imprint of the Trinity” and arguing that “ecological questions always have a religious dimension.”
If we return to a Catholic view of creation, that the natural world is alive with the spirit of God and that all of creation sings His praises, then it’s easy to see that “both the harm inflicted on nature and the failure to recognize, or… the rejection of the Creator’s plan, which entails entrusting to human beings the stewardship and care of our common home,” can be a sin against the God who so generously entrusted this world to our care.
The Eucharist as an ‘Ecological School’
The document emphasizes the connection between humanity’s two-fold vocation as steward and servant of creation and Christ’s gift of Himself in the Eucharist. The Eucharist, the document says, is an “ecological school” from which flows a “spirituality capable of supporting and encouraging the ecological conversion that we so urgently need to undertake.”
Now, if you’re leaning away from that language, mistrusting the soft, liberal-sounding words “ecological” and “spirituality,” remember that St. Francis’s devotion to the Eucharist was, in fact, the source of his own abundant love of nature. When your life is built around Christ’s Eucharistic presence among us, it’s natural to absorb some of His abundant love for His Creation.
In the Gospels, Christ reminds us that no sparrow falls to earth without His knowing it – and when we meditate on that, we start to realize that He doesn’t just mean that each animal is accounted for in His mind like numbers on a grid. He means that each one is beloved by Him. Each sparrow, insect, or as-yet-undiscovered creature is known personally by God and loved by Him. Like your pet dog, but more so, each has a name that its Creator cherishes. Christ, who is willing to humble Himself and become bread for us, wants us to see His whole Creation with the eyes of love, and not with the predatory eyes of exploitation.
A Universal Calling
We don’t have to spend our lives in warring camps. We shouldn’t. We belong to a universal Church, and while we may disagree on serious issues – we may even disagree on essentials of the faith – we shouldn’t reject obvious goods, like the stewardship of our common home, simply because “ecology” is a word that seems to belong to one “side” of a culture war. As Catholics, we’re called to look beyond polarizing language to Christ; who, in the Eucharist invites us to love as He loves – with a tender, focused, personal love for all.
