Catholics and Earth Day

The environment and our relationship with it has become one of the recurring and dominant topics of our societal discourse in the last decade. Few topics have their own holiday but the environment certainly does: Earth day. The day dates back to the birth of the contemporary environmental movement in 1970. According to the Earth Day network the purpose of the day was to have a “national teach-in on the environment” that mobilizes the people and politicians of the world to respond to the environmental crisis.

The day and the environmental movement have deeply pagan ideas at the core of the movement, including anthropomorphism of the Earth. By this I mean the idea that Earth is our 'mother,' most evident in the concept of Gaia the pagan Earth Goddess. Many Christians, myself included, have difficulty accepting the motives of the environmental movement due to the overt pagan nature of the movement. It, like the modern 'social justice' movement, bears all the hallmarks of a religion. There are creeds, a formal magisterium, and heretics. Now there's a call for an Inquisition, not like the one in history but the distorted vision of an Inquisition taught in our secular Protestant schools.

You may think from all of this that I deny human caused climate change. I don't, actually. I'm in the early stages of writing a doctoral dissertation on Catholic Social Teaching as it relates to sustainable development. As it happens I tend to agree that the evidence points to the climate changing and that we, collectively, need to continue to investigate the causes as well as the claims that the data is being distorted purposefully by the scientific community. True scientific skepticism requires no less.

What duty do Christians have to the environment? Like everything else in our faith, the duty of Catholics is one of relationship.We are called to have a relationship with God, right? Genesis tells us that we were given the Earth to till, work, and keep. In Laudato Si, Pope Francis reiterates what John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI both taught, that we were given the Earth as stewards. Stewardship has long been a concept in Catholic Social Teaching, taught traditionally as our individual and collective responsibility towards our brother and sister.

Stewardship of creation is hard for some to grasp so I'll use a metaphor. Suppose your father restored a classic car by hand. The car meant a lot to him, going so far as to call the car the most beautiful he had seen. On your 16th birthday, after getting your license, he gives you the keys to car to drive to school, work, and on dates. How would you treat the car? In theory you'd treat the car with respect because you know how much work your father put into building the car and how much he loved it. You'd know that the car was given to you as a sign of your maturity, at least in theory. Of course, being a 16 year old sinner you'd likely drive the car less-than carefully, and likely would do damage to it.

That's the situation we are faced with. We've taken creation, which we are to be stewards of, and abused it, going beyond tilling and keeping the Earth and instead have decided, in the words of Pope Francis, that the Earth that God declared to be 'good' was not 'good enough' and have polluted the place in the name of greed and selfishness. That'd be a bit like taking your dad's classic car and putting a hideous, ugly plastic neon green spoiler on it and dumping fuel additives that add power but damage the engine to better facilitate drag racing.

The way we treat the Earth should reflect our attitudes towards God and towards one another. This is a concept too complex for a short blog post but the essence of this is this: we are commanded to love one another and to love God. Our love of God should extend to those things he has entrusted to our care, whether its creation or our brothers and sisters who are at vulnerable. Just as abortion is a condemnation of our love for one another, so too are acidic seas, industrial run off that kills streams, and forest management practices that both leave forests more prone to wildfires and leave local populations unemployed.  We are to treat creation with respect not because creation is a god or goddess of some kind but because they are the property of God entrusted to us. So on this Earth day reflect on both the disordered way the secular world celebrates creation and our own attitudes towards the Earth and our relationship to God. Everything should come back to that relationship. That's part of the joy of Catholicism: everything is about relationships. Let's act like it.