The Greenest Pope in History?

Is Benedict XVI the “green pope”? Some Catholics seem to think so , though Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, says the pontiff is the ” not-so-green pope “:

[T]he present hype about “the greenest pope in history”—to cite another headline—is misleading. A somewhat different picture emerges from careful analysis of Benedict’s formal pronouncements on environmental matters . . . .

No one should be surprised that Benedict insists that people are  intrinsically more valuable than nature – a point disputed by some Green-leaning philosophers. Nor should we be shocked to discover that Benedict describes positions that question humanity’s innate superiority to the natural world as facilitating “attitudes of neo-paganism or a new pantheism” (CV 48).

In this connection, it’s worth underscoring  Caritas in Veritate’s extensive disputation of the “population-growth-is-evil” thesis (CV 44). Population alarmism has been a staple ingredient of much environmentalist ideology ever since Paul Ehrlich’s infamous 1968 book,  The Population Bomb, predicted (wrongly) that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” and enormous environmental damage would flow from millions futilely trying to feed themselves.

The dominant theological lens through which  Caritas in Veritate views environmental concerns is that of stewardship. Stewardship concerns humans protecting  and cultivating nature for their own and God’s purposes, and even using new technologies to enhance nature’s ability to serve us (CV 50). In short, nature is neither to be deified nor arbitrarily exploited. That’s a Jewish and Christian motif as old as the Book of Genesis itself.

Sounds to me that when “green” is rightly understood (in a Christian stewardship context) that the title of greenest pope could apply to Benedict. Bryan Wandel , however, thinks the honor goes to Sylvester II : “Sylvester’s carbon footprint is reputed to be zero.”