B I S H O P R O B E R T BA R R O N

Pope Francis, Evangelicals, and the Environment

Pope Francis, Evangelicals, and the Environment

BISHOP ROBERT BARRON

The whole world has watched with fascination as Pope Francis, over the past few years, has touched the hearts of people from nearly every faith background. The uni-versality of Pope Francis continues to be on display in his encyclical Laudato Si’, which focuses on our global responsibility to unite in care for our planet.

Recently I was invited to speak at a meeting in Santa Bar-bara that championed the efforts of Pope Francis by way of an interfaith dialogue on the topic of the environment. In this meeting there were leaders from many of the major religions of the world, and I was able to express to them (and the broad-based audience) Pope Francis’ truly biblical vision of environmental protection, which he expresses in Laudato Si’.

I thought I would share details of how the conversation went and explain more about the Pope’s evangelical approach to environmental issues on a special episode of “The Word on Fire Show.”

Below you’ll find an edited transcript of the show so you can read it slowly, at your own pace, and reflect on how

you can share the good news of our Lord with the people nearest and dearest to you.

Peace,

Pope Francis’Evangelical Environment

BISHOP ROBERT BARRON

Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, Skokie 60077 © 2016 by Word on Fire Catholic Ministries

www.wordonfire.org

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QUESTION: The encyclical Laudato Si’ was recently released by Pope Francis to great fanfare. Today we will discuss the talk Bishop Barron gave at the interfaith dialogue. You’ve written and you’ve done a couple of videos on Laudato Si’ but what did you focus on for this talk?

BISHOP BARRON: What I did was, I put the encyclical into two different contexts. The first one was the context of Romano Guardini and the second was a context of the Book of Gen-esis. Now why Guardini? When the fifty-year-old Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis’ birth name) found himself on the losing side of a political battle in the Jesuit order in Argentina (yes there are politics in the Church) it was kind of a dark time in his life. He was effectively out of power and often times when you want to exile a Jesuit you send him to doctoral studies. So, off they sent him to Germany to study Romano Guardini, whom he reverenced.

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Who is Romano Guardini? One of the really great and influential theologians of the twentieth century. Hugely impactful on Vatican II. He was a mentor to Joseph Ratzinger. He was admired by Carl Rahner, another hugely important player. Well, Bergoglio goes to Germany to write a doc-toral paper, which didn’t work out well. He came home after a year. I think he was too old to start doctoral studies at fifty. He was homesick, he was unhappy. The doctorate never came to fruition. However, he spent a lot of time reading Guardini.

Now, go back to Guardini and his great little book called Letters from Lake Como. He was Italian by heritage, with that lovely Italian name, but he was nevertheless a German culturally. His par-ents brought him to Germany when he was just one-year-old. Anyway, like a lot of Germans he enjoyed vacations in Italy, and his favorite place to vacation was Lake Como, near Milano. What he explains in these “letters” is the environmental shift that took place within his own lifetime from a sort of pre-modern to a modern consciousness in the area surrounding the lake.

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When he first went there, he noticed how the homes were very much in harmony with the nat-ural environment. They followed the lines and rhythms of the countryside, et cetera. He noticed the way boats plied the waters of Lake Como. In the beginning he said they did it in a kind of respectful way. They would kind of roll with the waves et cetera. But then as the years went by he saw the motorized boats that cut through the water in a kind of indifferent way, in order to get to where they needed to go.

Now he’s making a much broader point here. The point that in the modern consciousness we have a sort of aggressive attitude toward nature. Think of someone like Francis Bacon who said, “We should put nature on the rack and force her to give up her secrets.” Juxtapose that with Aristotle of the ancient world who would say philosophy begins in wonder and the philosopher’s attitude (for him that would mean scientist’s too) is one of contemplation. Well with Bacon you get a very different thing. It’s the aggressive modern mind that wants to know and master and control.

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Now a little bit after Bacon you’ve got Rene Descartes, essentially the founder of modern philosophy. Descartes said, “We need to master nature.” In the first case nature is like a prisoner that you want to rack in order to extract infor-mation. In the second, nature is like a slave that you want to master, dominate. Well, Guardini says this attitude that began back in the sixteenth and seventh centuries has now come to dominate ordinary consciousness. That we think of nature as just something that we need to control and master and dominate. Here Guardini becomes a kind of post-modern hero, because he’s critical of the aggressive rationality of modernity.

Well I suggested in the talk that on almost every page of Laudato Si’ you can discern Guardini’s influence. The Pope even mentions in Laudato

Si’ how homes should be built according to nat-ural rhythms. That’s right out of Letters from Lake

Como. I made that point in my talk in order to contextualize it. This is not as some people might claim, “the global warming encyclical”. That’s to miss the forest for one very particulate tree. I wanted to put the Pope’s writings in this broader

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theological context whereby the human project is situated in the context of nature and the en-vironment. It’s not there to be mastered by us, dominated. But we’re meant to live in a sort of contemplative harmony with it. That was my first incursion in trying to understand this encyclical.

QUESTION: You helped them to understand Laudato Si’ in light of Guardini but also you said explained it in light of Genesis. What points did you focus on there?

BISHOP BARRON: Well there I wanted to say that behind both Bergoglio and Gauradini is the great witness of the Bible. I said now to get this we have to go back to the very beginning of the Book of Genesis. I think it’s a very subtle move that the author of Genesis makes as things come forth from the speech of God. God says, “Let there be light,” and there’s light. God says, “Let the earth be formed,” and, “Let the earth teem with wild animals,” et cetera. What are you seeing as God speaks the universe into existence? First of all, you’re seeing a de-divinization or dethronement of any claim that worldly things are divinities.

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Walk through the whole of what God creates in Genesis. In some cultures of the ancient world those things were worshiped as gods. The sun, moon, planets, the stars, the earth itself, animals of various kind, rivers, and mountains – all those things at one time or another were worshiped in the ancient world. The author of Genesis is saying not to worship them. They are all creations of God. This sets nature in its proper place – not something to be reverenced or worshiped. Now at the same time, watch how they come forth in their orderly and harmonious ranks much like a liturgical procession. Each one comes in a day, then evening comes, and morning follows the next day with a new creation and so on – that’s how it’s described. It’s just like a stately liturgical procession. At the end of which, comes the hu-man being.

Now who’s the most important member of a litur-gical procession, the one that comes at the end, right? What’s the role of nature, not to be wor-shiped but rather to offer worship. The purpose of nature is to witness to the creator God but nature

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can’t speak. Who’s the one element now as far as we know in nature that can speak? Human beings. What’s our job? It is to be the great priests of this cosmic liturgy. We lead nature in the praise of the true God. Now nature finds its proper dignified place. We’re not inclined to abuse and misuse a beautiful liturgical procession, but to guide and protect it. Nature’s meant to give praise to God but precisely under the leadership of the human being.

I suggested the famous phrase about Adam be-came a steward of creation. Having dominion over nature does not mean domination. It means that we become the liturgical high priests of the cosmic praise of God. I link that finally to the temple in Jerusalem, covered inside and out with images of the created world. Because the praise taking place there was not just human beings praising God but these great priests praising God on behalf of all creation. I suggest that is the right way to understand us in relation to the environ-ment. Then I think we get all the accents right. We avoid falling into an abuse of nature. At the

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same time, we don’t fall into a worship of nature or a hyper-stress on reverencing nature. I think that’s the right liturgical balance. Anyway, that was really the burden of my half-hour talk that night.

QUESTION: I’m guessing as you’re giving the talk a lot of the Protestant leaders were proba-bly nodding their head in agreement with your framing of the talk in light of the Bible. But I am curious, how did some of the other religious lead-ers react? What did they say during the following panel discussion?

BISHOP BARRON: I found a lot of things interesting about the discussion. There was a very strong presence of Muslims there and one of the panelists was an Enam from the community, a younger man, maybe in his high thirties. He gave a very compelling presentation I thought, and I don’t know that much about the Quran to be honest with you. I’ve read bits or pieces of it but he was going through a number of things in the Quran that I thought were very congruent with

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what I was trying to argue. He talked about how when a pious Muslim prays, he purposely gets down on the ground. It’s a link right away to the earth. We’re not praying in alienation but we’re praying in some ways with the earth.

He told me something, too, I didn’t really realize that there’s water always involved in Muslim prayer. Again, the same idea of including the ele-ments. But also he insisted, the Quran talks about praying on behalf of nature. Giving voice to the praise of nature. I thought that was very interest-ing and I told him afterwards I didn’t realize that and it’s very close to the way I was trying to read the Bible.

There was a Protestant, a Presbyterian Minister on the panel. He spoke mostly about how he admires Pope Francis and how much Francis has meant to him and he said too, I think correctly, that a lot of early Protestantism was in line with the sort of Bacon/courtesan view and did become too rationalistic, too aggressive. He recognized those tendencies precisely in Protestantism. Then observed that in much more recent years they’ve

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made lot of shifts and now see the importance of the commonality between us and nature.

There was a representative from the Native American tradition and she brought out very clearly the strong sense of their connection to nature. Praying for the water and the winds and so on. She was good at pointing that out. I caught a little bit of what I call a kind of “prelapsarian” view that you get sometimes in the Native Amer-ican spokespeople. Almost as though the Native Americans just had this totally together. They understood all this perfectly from the beginning. They weren’t given over to the ways of violence and all that.

I always get a little bit skeptical when anyone ide-alizes a culture because my Biblical consciousness says, “We’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” There was no civilization prior to the fall that fully exemplifies all the right atti-tudes. Is there a little bit of a tendency in some ancient tribal cultures and in our nostalgia for those cultures to almost worship nature? I think

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there can be. And during the discussion, I in-sisted on the point that nature is great, it’s good, even “very good”, says the Bible. It’s meant to be this great chorus of praise. But as Augustine said, “look higher.” Whenever you look out at nature and see its beauties, you need to still look higher. Look higher. What we worship is the creator God, not what’s been created. We appreciate it, but we don’t worship it. I tried to stress the proper spiritual context of nature.

QUESTION: Any reactions from the Bud-dhists or the Hindu leaders?

BISHOP BARRON: No. I don’t remember anything from the floor. I got a little bit from the kind of secularist background. There were people there clearly who were not believers. There was a guy who was kind of an aging hippy type. He was probably about seventy-years-old and he said, “you know there are some of us here who don’t believe in creation. We believe that our body just came forth from the earth”, et cetera. He made his point and I said, “Yes, but don’t make the mistake

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of thinking science and God’s creation are mutu-ally exclusive.” Yes, indeed, we can say our human bodies went through all sorts of evolutionary pro-cesses before it came to where it is now. But I said that’s in no way in conflict with a creation view.

I tried to clarify that creation means the rapport that remains even now between non-contingent being and contingent being. Evolution names a biological process but creation names a meta-physical state and those two are not mutually exclusive. I think that’s a problem often with sec-ulars, they take a very materialistic, somewhat naive construal of religion as the default position. I try to tease people out of that.

Here’s another one, a lady got up and she said, would you say Bishop that the greatest problem facing us today, the greatest moral problem is our abuse of the environment? I said no. The great-est moral problem is sin, which is falling out of friendship with God. That then has a thousand consequences, one of which is an indifference to nature and all of that. I said very clearly that sin is

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the greatest problem and our recovering a sense of God and then a friendship with God is priority one. From that will come the right attitude toward the environment, but I don’t think the environ-ment’s problem number one.

I kept trying to bring it back to a religious talk, and not let anyone reduce religion to environ-mentalism, which is a big issue out here and I totally get that. Someone mentioned, for example, how in some ways the environmental movement began in Santa Barbara from an oil spill many many years ago. I think in the 1970’s. It aroused people to a deeper consciousness of the earth and how we abuse it. I think that’s great. I’m proud that Santa Barbara is one of the sources of that movement, but we don’t worship the earth. We honor the earth and we reverence it. We pray on its behalf, but we don’t worship it. Anyway that was my little contribution.

QUESTION: This whole event, it kind of sym-bolizes the phenomenon that’s been growing over the last few years and that’s a relationship between

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Pope Francis and many Protestant Christians and especially many Evangelicals. You mentioned the Presbyterian Minister there who was very positive about Pope Francis. I think of others like Bishop Tony Palmer, the Episcopal Bishop who unfortunately died recently but who was a close friend of Pope Francis and they worked together. I think too of Rick Warren, your friend who’s a pastor, maybe the most popular Protestant Pastor in our country. He has been over to the Vatican I think a couple times. He gave the keynote address at the World Meeting of Families and referred to Pope Francis as Holy Father and says he watches EWTN. There seems to be this convergence of Evangelicals and the Pope in particular, but Cath-olics in general, and here we are on the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. What do you make of all that? Why does Pope Francis seem to have this draw for Protestants and Evangelicals in particular?

BISHOP BARRON: I think it’s fascinating to watch how the Holy Spirit works in the choosing of popes. You know because you think of these

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great heroic popes in my lifetime, especially John Paul II, and then there’s Francis who is very much not John Paul II. He’s a very different figure. You won’t find that sort of philosophical precision. You’re not going to find the theological wisdom of a Pope Benedict. What you find though with Francis is this great genius for the provocative gesture. He has an instinct for the essentials that I think is attractive to any Christian. An instinct for the mercy of God, for care for the marginalized and the poor. He speaks in the manner of Jesus. He acts in the manner of Jesus.

I think that legitimately builds bridges. It reaches out to Christians of any stripe but as we’ve seen, not just Christians but religious people of any stripe, even secularists. It’s the simplicity and pow-er of his gestures that I think build these bridges. There’s something about his personality that is very warm and very welcoming. When it comes to people within the church he can certainly be quite blunt and critical and direct, but I think his manner towards the outside world is very involving and inviting, welcoming. But it’s his

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instinct for the provocative gesture, which cuts to the heart of Christianity that appeals across the board I think.

QUESTION: You’ve recently wrote an article called Pope Francis and the Evangelicals and one of the elements you focused on was his emphasis on Evangelical urgency. That the basic mission of the church right now is to proclaim the Gospel to people who are indifferent or have never heard it. Do you think this is part of the reason why so many Evangelical Christians are drawn to him?

BISHOP BARRON: Yes, that’s part of it I think. This provocative gesture, yes indeed. But also it’s his instinct for the basics. His instinct for the essential manners. I think he knows, as we all do, the large number of people who are falling away from the Catholic Church. There’s sort of an attenuation of Christianity through most of the West. He gets that. Evangelli Gaudium, which I think is a great document and sums up well a lot of the best instincts of the New Evangelization,

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is definitely going to be popular amongst the Protestants. They like the fact that Catholics are speaking with this Evangelical urgency.

I think it’s a work of the Holy Spirit that we’ve been shaken out of a certain institutional complacen-cy. We had this grand international institutional structure. People came to it and got Evangelized in great numbers. But when that began to break down (as it did after Vatican II and is now in many ways in full retreat) we’ve got to find a different strategy and it requires re-evangelizing a lot of people who have grown indifferent to the faith. I’m continually amazed (maybe I shouldn’t be) by how ignorant a lot of people are of the Christian basics. Even just fifty years ago you could assume in our country that the vast majority of people had the Christian basics in place in their minds. That’s not true anymore.

You learn that while working with younger people. Christian knowledge we would take utterly for granted, young people are often clueless about. I remember Cardinal George, my great mentor, ex-

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plaining how it takes only one generation of the faith not being communicated effectively to lose it entirely. It’s not like it’s just hanging around. It’s got to be communicated. We know more and more that it’s not being communicated effective-ly. Pope Francis gets that I think and that’s why we now have this urgency about evangelization, which a lot our Protestant friends have been more aware of these past fifty years. Sharing the urgent mission of evangelization is a bridge, a bridge for sure.

QUESTION: If you want more on that topic, Bishop Barron’s DVD film, Catholicism: The New

Evangelization explains how we all can answer the call to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his mystical body, the Church with those around us.

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