My
writings on the Catholic perspective of ecology owe much to Pope Benedict XVI.
This blog in particular has provided a real-time examination of the pontiff’s
words and deeds related to abiding by and protecting nature.
And
now—with the sudden and shocking news of his renouncing the Chair of Peter—we
Catholic ecologists must say farewell to a pontiff that not only followed his
predecessor’s ecological thought and practice, but escalated them well beyond
what anyone had ever expected.
Indeed, Benedict
XVI has been called the green pope by more than one news outlet. The question
is, why this interest in ecology?
I have written many posts that examine that question. But here I think
it’s helpful to examine that question by looking back on the development of
Joseph Ratzinger’s theological and pastoral formation. In doing so, we find
clues that make clear why this man spent so much of his pontificate speaking
about a new reality for the human race: the destruction of our natural environment.
What follows is a look at a few key elements of his life and education that
are important to his ecological pedigree.
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| The Ratzingers. Jospeh seated at left. Photo: Ignatius Press. |
First,
as a young man, Ratzinger would watch nationalist zealotry—with its hunger for
an imminent political glory—attempt to sweep aside his own Catholic
Christianity along with other institutions, faiths, and peoples. In doing so,
Hitler’s National Socialism would view itself in religious—indeed,
eschatological—overtones. Ratzinger
would witness the brutality of—and be forced to participate in—the armies of
the Third Reich. National pride would swell when Hitler’s armies invaded
Poland, The Netherlands, and France, when “even people who were opposed to
National Socialism experienced a kind of patriotic satisfaction,” as the Holy
Father noted in his biography
Milestones.
For others such as Ratzinger’s father, the march of the Third Reich were
victories “of the Antichrist that would surely usher in apocalyptic times.”
In
his humble biography, Ratzinger provides a small but telling example of the
madness that his nation was undergoing: as a soldier he was forced to take part
in a “cult of the spade,” a drill-like performance that he describes as a
“pseudo-liturgy” meant to celebrate the redemptive power of a soldier’s work.
Later, when Nazi military losses grew, the spades were used only for digging
protective trenches: “[T]his fall of the spade from cultic object to banal tool
for everyday use allowed us to perceive the deeper collapse taking place ... a
full-scale liturgy and the world behind it were being unmasked as a lie.”
In
contrast with this lie was Ratzinger’s growing relationship with a lasting
truth. In recalling how as a boy he would be taught the mysteries of the
Church’s liturgies, Ratzinger tells us something of how he sees the relation
between the Church and history. He recalls that, as a boy learning of his
faith,
it was becoming
more and more clear to me that here I was encountering a reality that no
official authority or great individual had created. This mysterious fabric of
texts and actions had grown from the faith of the Church over the centuries. It
bore the whole weight of history within itself, and yet, at the same time, it
was much more than the product of human history. Every century had left its
mark upon it ... [but] not everything was logical. Things sometimes got
complicated, and it was not always easy to find one’s way. But precisely this
is what made the whole edifice wonderful, like one’s own home.
Ratzinger’s
post-war return home would occur in June 1945, when American forces released
him from a prisoner-of-war camp. He made quickly for Traunstein, finding his
family village at sunset filled with the hymns from its church—hymns sung in
honor of the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
After the war, he returned to and
advanced in his theological and priestly studies. In 1949 an adviser introduced
him to a key influence in Ratzinger’s intellectual and personal development:
Henri de Lubac and his book Catholicism;
Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. Ratzinger notes that
this book was for me a key reading event.
It gave me not only a new and deeper connection with the thought of the Fathers
but also a new way of looking at theology and faith as such. Faith had here
become an interior contemplation and, precisely by thinking with the Fathers, a
present reality. In this book one could detect a quiet debate going on with
liberalism and Marxism, the dramatic struggle of French Catholicism for a new
penetration of the faith and into the freedom of an essentially social faith,
conceived and lived as a we—a faith that,
precisely as such and according to its nature, was also hope, affecting history
as a whole, and not only the promise of a private blissfulness to individuals.
In
Catholicism, Ratzinger would
experience a thirst-quenching expression of the Eucharistic nature of the
Church—a mystical body of real people living in authentic, gritty history. De
Lubac’s forays into matters such as the “Role of Time” and “Doctrines of
Evasion” (that is, evasions from the sufferings of this world) will illuminate
Ratzinger’s observations of the secular forces that shaped the twentieth
century.
De
Lubac would be a bridge connecting the twentieth century with the world of the
Fathers—especially Augustine and Origen—and his eschatological worldview kept
the faithful very much in, as Ratzinger put it above, the present reality and the we
of the Church. De Lubac writes that “the Christian’s watchword can no longer be
‘escape’ but ‘collaboration’. He must cooperate with God and men in God’s work
in the world and among humanity. There is but one end: and it is on condition
that he aims at it together with all men that he will be allowed a share of the
final triumph.”
Ratzinger
will read such statements by de Lubac and watch Platonic circular concepts of
history, per Augustine, “explode” so that “forthwith something new is
wrought—birth, real growth; the whole universe grows to maturity. ... [T]he
world has a purpose and consequently a meaning, that is to say, both direction
and significance.” Ratzinger would turn also to de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum, which, in Ratzinger’s words, would provide “a new
understanding of the unity of the Church and Eucharist opened up to me beyond
the insights I had already received ... [and so] I could now enter into the
required dialogue with Augustine.”
This
“dialogue with Augustine” is a third influence on Ratzinger’s views on theology
and history. One can glimpse the importance of Augustine to Ratzinger in his
autobiographical recollection of the appreciation with which he read Martin
Buber’s philosophy of personalism. Ratzinger notes that Buber roused in him the
same “essential mark” as had the Bishop of Hippo, “especially since I
spontaneously associated such personalism with the thought of St. Augustine, who in his Confessions had struck me with the power
of all his human passion and depth.” This stands in contrast to Ratzinger’s
“difficulties” with Thomas Aquinas, “whose crystal-clear logic seemed to me to
be too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made.”
Indeed, when a
young Ratzinger read Augustine’s study of the collapse of Rome,
he knew all too well from the Nazi regime and their own inner lies about
worldly domination the reason why pagan Rome
suffered. They rejected revelation and refused communion with the God who is
love.
Ratzinger
appreciated Augustine’s correction to this refusal,
The City of God—a text that would become a foundational work of
Western civilization—in large part because it highlighted the humble entrance
of the Word into world affairs.
The City of God maintained a primacy of
caritas—sacrificial love.
After his work on Augustine, he wrote a second doctoral thesis. This was required by the German theological academy for anyone seeking to teach. Ratzinger's topic for this thesis was St. Bonaventure's view of history and revelation. The thesis caused great turmoil in large part because of disagreement between Ratzinger's advisers. It may surprise some today to hear this, but some of these advisers challenged the young theologian that he would become "dangerously modern" with his work on Bonaventure's view of scripture having a "historical character." But Ratzinger (and the other advisers) won the day. The result was a substantial work that has added greatly to the Catholic academic corpus.
Something else took place in writing this thesis that is important for the present conversation. Ratzinger's study of Bonaventure was specific to an episode within the young Franciscan Order. Not long after the death of Francis, a faction of the order known as the "spiritualists" found themselves at odds with orthodoxy. These Franciscans followed and somewhat misinterpreted the writings of a twelfth century abbot, Joachim of Fiore, who seemed to have made a series of intriguing predictions about a "new age" and who saw the story of the Church as an active one because history was far from stagnant—which, by the twelfth century, seemed fairly obvious.
The details of the matter are too great to delve into here. What is important for understanding Ratzinger's development and his eventual championing of Catholic ecology was how he witnessed in Bonaventure a pastor who was both unafraid of worldly change and was able to lovingly find ways to call errant members of his flock home. Bonaventure was able to offer the spiritualists a way back to orthodoxy by providing a fair reading of their works and finding aspects within it that had value. As a result, Bonaventure added to Christian thought the sense of revelation interacting with history—of grace baptizing new historical realities because of what Ratzinger would describe in his thesis as the "obligation" for disciples of Christ to sacrificially "love in the present."
From such
influences, we can see how a young (and elderly) Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI
stresses that Christian love—acting within history—is the antidote for all that
disfigures the world.
All this is important
to understand his ecological interests because science and current events are
increasingly demonstrating the effects that man’s consumption is having on the
natural world—and on human cultures.
For Ratzinger, man is at war with nature
because we are too often at war with God. As St. Paul reminds us in his letter to the
Romans, we are all sinners and we all fall short of the glory of God. For much of
human history, this falling short has fueled war, intolerance, and all sorts of violations to human dignity. But such realities have been and often still are relatively short-lived or
localized by cultural boundaries. Yes, they are severe and evil, but no one war or
one violation of a people has ever affected the entire globe.
Until now.
Ecological
issues began as rather local affairs but they are now global
realities. Planetary systems of life are now compromised by man’s sin—our over-consumption, our ignoring of the laws of nature, and our refusal to seek first the Kingdom of God.
The young
Joseph Ratzinger had an upbringing in his family and Church—in the stunning beauty of Bavaria—that allowed him a
unique vision of the harm that man’s sin can cause and how, if we are to avoid this harm, we must accept God’s love and allow it to transform us in the actual moments of the present. For Pope
Benedict XVI, a true culture of life is within our grasp only because God
continually makes Himself present in the sacramental presence of the Church.
The question, then, is if we accept this grace—this love—and allow it to change our inner selves,
to reorient our human desires away from a consumption of worldly goods to an
embracing of the God that is love.
For it is only
by the grace of God that we humans will live in accord with—and thus
protect—the nature of things.
Because of the
presence of this man Joseph Ratzinger in the Church’s unbroken line of popes,
his teachings will illuminate those of his successors until the end of time. Because Pope Benedict
has made it clear that ecology is matter of magisterial importance, no future
pope can now ignore the Catholic engagement of ecology. Indeed, it was
ultimately the Holy Spirit that brought Joseph Ratzinger
through his life and to the Chair of Peter and so has forever introduced to the
Church’s teachings the place of ecology in Catholic thought and practice.
This last point is what the Holy Father has demonstrated in his departure from the role of
pontiff. In his last homily on Ash Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI said this
Our fitness will always be more effective the less we seek our own glory and the more we are aware that
the reward of the righteous is God Himself, to be united to Him, here, on a
journey of faith, and at the end of life, in the peace light of coming face to
face with Him forever (cf. 1 Cor 13:12).
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These
words are central to the Christian view of what it means to be human. They are
also words that speak to how humans can live in accord with nature and keep it
safe. But these are not simply the words of Pope Benedict. They are the promptings of the
Holy Spirit and the teachings of Christ spoken in the present by the Vicar of
Christ to a Church that is facing unprecedented global realities. Given Pope
Benedict’s theological upbringing, he is able to speak of ecological issues and connect them with more basic realities of faith and reason. Thanks to his affinity for the likes of St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, Henri de Lubac, and so many others, he knows that the Church is always able to
dialogue with new realities because she possess the timeless truths of God.
We can be certain that the next Successor of Peter will
continue on the path that Bl. John Paul II and Benedict XVI has taken the
Church—a path that leads to an awareness of the ecological crises that now
envelope the globe and a path that leads to the answer to these crises—to Christ, who alone
can take away the sins of the world.
May
God bless and protect our pontiff in his last days in service to us and may he
be blessed and protected in his final days here on this side of Eden.
