Should recent Catholic Church teachings on the environment be regarded as suspect? In the eyes of some, these teachings appear to be without precedent in the Church’s tradition and unduly influenced by a secular movement, some of whose members are fixated on reducing CO2 in the atmosphere by reducing human populations through means such as abortion. But an examination of Pope Benedict’s notion of “integral ecology” allows us to see that the Church’s vision of care for nature is both more expansive than that of the various forms of secular environmentalism and also solidly rooted in traditional Catholic teachings.
Marie George is Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University in New York and the author of Stewardship of Creation: What Catholics should know about Church Teaching on the Environment (Saint Catherine of Siena Press, 2009). She writes for Catholic Rural Life, is a member of the Long Island Botanical Society, and is an avid hiker. Her book Plants, Animals, People, Aliens is forthcoming from The Catholic University of America Press. Learn more about the Humanities Forum here!
