Benedict XVI's Cosmic Soteriology and Environmentalism

Pope Benedict XVI is beyond doubt a world class theologian.  His theology (thanks in large part to Ignatius Press) is highly accessible to the English-speaking world and has had a profound impact on society.  He has been described as the "greenest pope in history" thanks to his advocacy of environmentalism and his emphasis on respect for creation.¹  In his encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate, the pontiff writes, "The Church has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere."²

Crater Lake, Oregon
CC image courtesy of Stuart Seeger on Flickr

The underpinnings of the pontiff's environmentalism are highly theological.  For Benedict, the entire cosmos shares in the salvation brought about by Christ.  He describes the cosmic scope of salvation in the final paragraph of Eschatology:

Heaven will only be complete when all the members of the Lord’s body are gathered in.  Such completion on the part of the body of Christ includes, as we have seen, the ‘resurrection of the flesh.’  It is called the ‘Parousia’ inasmuch as then the presence of Christ, so far only inaugurated among us, will reach its fulness and encompass all those who are to be saved and the whole cosmos with them.  And so heaven comes in two historical stages.  The Lord’s exaltation gives rise to the new unity of God with man, and hence to heaven.  The perfecting of the Lord’s body in the pleroma of the ‘whole Christ’ brings heaven to its true cosmic completion.  Let us say it once more before we end: the individual’s salvation is whole and entire only when the salvation of the cosmos and all the elect has come to full fruition.  For the redeemed are not simply adjacent to each other in heaven.  Rather, in their being together as the one Christ, they are heaven.  In that moment, the whole creation will become song.  It will be a single act in which, forgetful of self, the individual will break through the limits of being into the whole, and the whole take up its dwelling in the individual.  It will be joy in which all questioning is resolved and satisfied.³

The basis for Benedict's insistence that human beings respect creation is that both humanity and the rest of creation share the same destiny, a destiny designed by God and fulfilled in Christ.

In addition to his ecological moral injunctions, Benedict explicitly associates environmental issues with life issues and argues that the two are inseparable:

The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that shapes human coexistence: when “human ecology” is respected within society, environmental ecology also benefits. Just as human virtues are interrelated, such that the weakening of one places others at risk, so the ecological system is based on respect for a plan that affects both the health of society and its good relationship with nature . . . If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves. The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment and damages society.⁴

Human beings need to respect the environment but they cannot respect it unless they respect their own humanity.  Abortion, euthanasia, and the exploitation of human beings for the sake of technological development cannot be ignored at the expense of the exploitation of the earth - these two tasks are mutually interrelated.  One cannot truly care about the environment if one is unconcerned that there are millions of abortions occurring in our own country, and one cannot truly care about human beings if one is unconcerned about the way companies and individuals harm the environment through the dumping of chemical wastes and other ecological disasters that occur throughout the world.  Benedict is right to see that these two concerns are connected.  We must, as a Church destined for salvation in Christ with the rest of creation, care for creation too, and fulfill our Adamic role as stewards of creation.

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1. Benedict XVI and Woodeene Koenig-Bricker, Ten Commandments for the Environment: Pope Benedict XVI Speaks Out for Creation and Justice (Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria, 2009), 8.^↩

2. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009), 51. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html.^↩

3. Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 237-238.^↩

4. Caritas in Veritate, 51.^↩