Earlier this month I responded to a Commonweal article about the way conservative Catholics, especially George Weigel, seem to stress Pope Francis’s views on abortion while essentially ignoring those parts of Catholic social teaching that might conform better to the American left.
In today’s post I want to point out how liberal Catholics, like those singing the praises of Francis’s recent encyclical on the environment, are cheering the Pope’s condemnation of corporations, human selfishness, and the so-called “throwaway culture”while downplaying his views that the protection of the environment is directly related in Catholic social teaching to the opposition to abortion.
Charles Camosy, a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham, says it best in his recent Washington Post op-ed. Here is a taste:
Conservatives obviously find themselves indicted rather strongly here, but the pope gives no quarter to liberals either. His reference to “eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted” is another reference to abortion. Perhaps an abortion-rights liberal could reply that his comments are unfair, and that women and men who seek abortions would never do so for such a casual reason. Perhaps, they could argue, this is an unfortunate but marginal part of an otherwise progressive encyclical.
They would be mistaken. Pope Francis, when he speaks about the throwaway culture, almost always includes abortion. The pope’s diagnosis of our ecological problem is that we have a spiritual sickness: Westerners are caught in a consumerist lifestyle which rewards selfishness and greed — and the lifestyle has produced a culture which ignores, abandons, or marginalizes the vulnerable and inconvenient.
In his recent exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis insists that prenatal children “are the most innocent and defenseless among us.” If the developed West is ever going to get serious about the radical transformation necessary to resist the throwaway culture and reverse the global climate crisis, the pope argues we must develop virtues and practices of welcome and nonviolence with respect to all marginal populations — including inconvenient prenatal children.
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Only one is imago dei, though. If it is “both” they are not equal, “nature” is not made in the image and likeness of God, only people are.
Thus the dignity of the human person is primary: Francis speaks of a “human ecology,” not ecology as an end in itself. Which is why he goes into the pro-life stuff as part of his greater message: We would not compromise human life or human dignity for the sake of “nature.”
“This is not to put all living beings on the same level nor to deprive human beings of their unique worth and the tremendous responsibility it entails. Nor does it imply a divinization of the earth which would prevent us from working on it and protecting it in its fragility. Such notions would end up creating new imbalances which would deflect us from the reality which challenges us. At times we see an obsession with denying any pre-eminence to the human person; more zeal is shown in protecting other species than in defending the dignity which all human beings share in equal measure.”
I wish there were more of this in the text, and as you note, the pro-life aspects are glossed over by many who share its warm & fuzzy eco-friendliness. Still, Francis's explicit purpose is to restore
The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole [that] was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted our mandate to “have dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), to “till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). As a result, the originally harmonious relationship between human beings and nature became conflictual (cf. Gen 3:17-19). It is significant that the harmony which Saint Francis of Assisi experienced with all creatures was seen as a healing of that rupture.
I think perhaps his perspective is influenced by growing up outside the First World, where burning out a few hundred acres for farmland–or a few thousand for a commercial plantation!–bears little moral stigma save from First World eco-warriors, and I think his economic worldview is serious need of an update–prosperity of the First World variety is a key facilitator of environmental awareness.
Human ecology starts with a full stomach, and nowhere does Francis deny this.
More from the often-sneered-at but never-cowed conservative George Weigel:
http://eppc.org/publications/the-popes-encyclical-at-heart-is-about-us-not-trees-and-snail-darters/
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I think it is for both, since both represent God's creation
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Excellent piece. Francis' concern is not for the earth, but for the people on it.
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