By Kevin Birnbaum
The Catholic Northwest Progress
October 01, 2009
“The green pope.”
That’s the nickname Pope Benedict XVI has earned since his election in 2005, a reputation few environmentalists could have predicted at the time.
In the past few years, the Vatican has taken strides toward becoming the world’s first carbon-neutral state, including installing a large solar-power generator on top of the Paul VI audience hall; and the pope has spoken and written repeatedly on the importance of caring for the natural environment.
In his latest encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” Pope Benedict devoted several paragraphs to environmental stewardship.
“The environment is God’s gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generations and towards humanity as a whole,” he wrote, warning against the “reckless exploitation” of nature.
While nature is not “more important than the human person,” the pope said, “it is also necessary to reject the opposite position, which aims at total technical dominion over nature.”
The pope connected care for the environment with the idea of “integral human development” and the dignity of the human person.
“The way humanity treats the environment influences the way it treats itself, and vice versa,” he said.
Local efforts
Many Catholics in the Archdiocese of Seattle are following the pope’s example with their own efforts to take better care of creation.
“We’re constantly trying to look at what’s the next step we can take in order to do a little better every year around the kind of impact that we make,” said Father Gary Zender, pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Renton.
“As a parish, we’re trying to take steps to really work on increasing our recycling, reducing the amount of waste that we produce, trying to be more efficient in terms of the amount of electricity that we use.”
This April, he said, 30 St. Anthony parishioners participated in an effort to clean up the Cedar River to make it more amenable for fish.
“Sometimes in the past when I’ve brought these issues up, people have said, ‘Oh, that’s just a political issue, you’re going off on an agenda, there’s no proof,’ and that sort of thing,” said Father Zender. “But let’s just set that aside, let’s look at what our church is saying — that’s what I’m telling people.”
St. James Cathedral Parish has also been making efforts to be more environmentally friendly, said outreach coordinator Patty Bowman.
“Some of it is kind of jazzy, and some is actually kind of boring,” having to do with efficient lighting and heating, she said.
The parish recently started composting the refuse from its Cathedral Kitchen lunch program for the homeless. “As you can imagine, a program that feeds 150 people a day generates a lot of scraps and carrot peels and onion skins,” said Bowman, so it makes a difference not to throw all that in the garbage. “This is a process, and there’s always something new that we can do to be more environmentally responsible.”
At St. Mary Parish in Seattle, the youth group has taken the lead in making the parish more “green,” said Pastoral Coordinator Tricia Wittmann-Todd. In January, the teens held a fundraising dinner, served 100 people and produced almost zero waste.
“The only thing they couldn’t figure out what to do with was the little caps on the tops of the two-liter bottles,” said Wittmann-Todd. “Everything else was either recycled or reusable.”
During St. Mary’s international festival in June, the youth group members “would literally stand guard by the trash places, telling people, ‘No, that goes into recycling.’ … At the end of the day we had one bag of garbage. They were literally sorting through the garbage … They’re sort of fanatics.”
What’s the big deal?
Jessie Dye, a St. Mary parishioner who works for Earth Ministry, an ecumenical organization devoted to care for the environment, gave three reasons for Catholics to care about the environment. First, she said, the earth is a gift from God that we should respect.
Second, “God gave us the garden to till and keep, which is not to pollute and plunder.
“But perhaps the most important reason in Catholic theology … is that we are … called to care for the poorest, and there is no question that the poorest suffer the most from environmental destruction.”
She said the U.S. should be doing more to develop green energy technology, for moral and practical reasons.
“Not only can we do it, but we had better do it, or we’re going to be paying other countries to supply the technology — solar and wind — to us” when the oil runs out.
“The pope … is a world leader in advocating for protecting creation,” she said. “My hope is that every bishop and pastor and person in the pews will read his words and take action.”