c. 2007 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ The Holy See announced earlier this month that it would soon become the world’s first “carbon neutral” sovereign state, planting trees in a Hungarian national park to offset the carbon-dioxide emissions and energy use of Vatican City.

It was only the latest of several recent statements and actions by the Roman Catholic Church’s leaders that reflect an increasingly prominent concern for ecology.

Over the last few months, the Vatican has sponsored a two-day conference on climate change, and Pope Benedict XVI and other church leaders have called for more attention to environmental problems.

In June, Vatican officials announced that they would cover the papal audience hall adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica with photovoltaic panels that will make it possible to heat, cool and light the building exclusively with solar power.

And in a sign that environmental problems are not merely a theoretical concern for the Holy See, Italian newspapers this month published photos of statues in St. Peter’s Square covered with black spots just eight years after their last cleaning. The damage, a Vatican official said, was due to exhaust from the neighborhood’s heavy bus and automobile traffic.

Many environmentalists welcome the growing involvement of the world’s largest church in the movement to protect nature from the effects of human industry. But some say that the Vatican’s approach to the subject is hampered by a lack of scientific expertise, and by a theological bias that privileges humanity over the rest of nature.

For their part, Catholic leaders are leery of any environmental policies that might hold back economic development; and they categorically reject proposals that conflict with church doctrines forbidding artificial birth control and abortion.

The Vatican’s support for environmental protection dates back at least to 1972, when Pope Paul VI sent a message of encouragement to a United Nations-sponsored conference on the subject in Stockholm, Sweden. A 1991 encyclical by Pope John Paul II introduced the concept of “human ecology,” placing new emphasis on humanity’s responsibility for care of the planet.

With interest in the environment rising among society at large, the Vatican’s own activity in the area has lately grown more intense. An official compendium of Catholic social teaching published in 2004 devoted a full chapter to the environment.

The church’s approach to environmental problems is characterized by the concept of “stewardship,” the belief that humanity has been divinely appointed to manage and care for the rest of the natural world.

While stewardship imposes limits on the exploitation of nature, some thinkers say it exaggerates the importance of humanity’s role.

“We’re saying that we are stewards for God, who is not present in the universe,” says the Rev. Sean McDonagh, a Catholic priest in Ireland who has authored 10 books on ecological theology. “Well, even traditional theology says that God is immanent in the world. You can’t have it both ways.”

The limits of current scientific knowledge also make stewardship an impractical concept, McDonagh says. “We haven’t a notion of how many creatures live on the planet with us, how many species. It could be 5 million, it could be 100 million. So who are we stewarding for?”

The Vatican is agnostic on the science behind some of the most discussed environmental questions, including the causes of climate change and the safety of genetically modified organisms in agriculture.

“We realize that climate change is a fact,” said Monsignor James M. Reinert of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. “But we’re not going to speak about global warming, or how or why. We’re convinced that we still don’t know.”

Reinert’s office, which sponsored the April conference on climate change, drew criticism for inviting several dissenters from the prevailing view that human activity is the primary cause for a rise in the Earth’s temperature.

The decision to invite the skeptics was part of the Holy See’s effort to “balance the debate,” said Antonio Gaspari, a professor of environmental science at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum University, who attended the conference.

According to Gaspari, the event’s roster was heavy with “catastrophists” who peremptorily blamed global warming on industry and overpopulation, and supported a “carbon tax” as a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Such a tax would unfairly burden emerging economies, Gaspari said, and the “Holy See will accept no solutions that limit the development of poor countries.”

The distance between ecologists and the church on this point might not be too great to bridge. In a telegram to the conference, Pope Benedict called for “the sustainable progress of peoples,” a phrase suggestive of the environmental movement’s goal of “sustainable development.”

And according to Paolo Conversi, who teaches human ecology at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, the mainstream environmental movement has shown itself increasingly sympathetic to the Catholic idea of “integral human development,” which places priorities on the quality of human life and ecological balance.

Agreement with environmentalists is less possible on the question of population size, Conversi said, given the church’s opposition to abortion and artificial contraception.

In Catholic thought, Conversi said, “it’s not the number of people but the quality and style of life that determine the impact on the environment.

DSB/JM END ROCCA1,000 words

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