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Abstract

Pope Francis’s ecology encyclical, Laudato Si’, is an occasion to reconsider the Catholic Church’s myriad forms of engagement with modern science over the past four centuries. Four broad categories can chronologically and conceptually represent key phases in the Roman Catholic Church’s developing relationship to modern science. The first three are: how the Church coped with the rise of astronomy and physics in the 16th to 18th centuries; the era of geology and evolutionary theory in the 19th through early 20th centuries; and the era of global, life-altering technologies in the mid- to late 20th century. The scientific advances in each of these periods generated legacies for our current era of ecology and sustainability. It is this fourth phase that is represented by the new papal encyclical.

Keywords

ecology encyclical ethics pope religion and science sustainability

Much has already been written about what Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015), says and what it might mean for ethics, politics, and religion in an era of economic globalization and environmental degradation (Erickson, 2015; Peppard, 2015; Vallely, 2015). (An encyclical is one of the highest forms of teaching from a pope as he interprets Roman Catholic doctrine.) And while the casual observer in the United States might be surprised by the pope’s turn to environmental matters, from my vantage point—as a professor of theology, science, and ethics at Fordham University—I see the reflection of decades of the Church’s increasingly broad engagement with science and social ethics. It is fair to say that Pope Francis’s encyclical is the most recent and authoritative instance of the Catholic Church’s centuries-long relationship with science.

This first encyclical on ecology—authored by a Jesuit pope, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi—draws heavily upon scientific consensus, as it calls for a recalibration of theological and ethical ways of looking at the world in light of widespread environmental degradation. Climate change appears early in the encyclical as an example of industrial humanity’s outsized impacts on planetary systems. With regard to climate science, the pope writes: “A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system,” and that “most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases … released mainly as a result of human activity” (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015).

And here Francis both is, and is not, saying something new: Pope John Paul II spoke of climate change as a moral and theological problem as early as 1990, and Benedict XVI and Francis took up the theme. Moral obligations to care for creation and for the poor have been consistently invoked and amplified in formal Vatican documents for several decades, even while their prominence may not have been readily apparent to many American Catholics.

In the past 10 years alone, the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences have convened summits on sustainability, economics, water, climate change, and other topics. In fact, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen of “Anthropocene” coinage is a long-standing member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences! (The term is a geological moniker suggested by Crutzen and others to reflect the current geological epoch, in which humanity has become a primary agent of planetary change—the results of which include mass extinctions and alterations to the atmosphere, to name two examples. “Anthropocene” is still under consideration as a formal term by a committee of the International Commission on Stratigraphy.)

So it is no accident that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research was a primary speaker at the press conference on the release of Laudato Si’ (Schellnhuber, 2015). The Catholic Church, or at least the Vatican, now accepts scientific consensus on climate change. It also accepts that human understandings of the world change as science advances. This has implications for interpretation of Scripture, as well as concepts of God and human beings’ roles in the cosmos.

To understand the Church’s relationship to contemporary science, we must revisit several more-or-less distinct historical periods that have made possible this most recent development in the Church’s ongoing navigation of religion and science.

The era of astronomy and physics

Granted, things did not start out well.

The 17th-century Catholic Church got the cosmos terribly wrong in its opposition to Copernicanism’s idea that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. The Church’s prior theological attachment to a Ptolemaic-Aristotelian conception of a geocentric universe remains an icon for those who wish to see a fundamental conflict between science and religion.

But the historical truth is somewhat more nuanced, in at least two ways. First, “science” as we understand it today simply didn’t exist in the 17th century. Thus Galileo—and Copernicus, Kepler, and others right up through the time of Darwin—are more accurately viewed as natural philosophers, or “proto-scientists,” who worked systematically to better describe the world that humans inhabit. Their naturalistic observations and methods laid important groundwork for what we now know as the scientific method, but the significance of those endeavors is more obvious to us in retrospect than it was to many Church officials at the time. Galileo’s early empirical observations are a type of natural philosophy attracted to methodical, meticulous observation, which broadened out to raise questions about the origins, development, and ultimate fate of the universe.

Of course, Galileo’s trial and house arrest were responses to his endorsement of Copernicanism. But in addition, those Church officials were obsessed with something else: Protestantism. The Reformation effectively challenged the Catholic Church’s claim to exclusive authority on matters of faith, Scripture, and ritual. In response, the Council of Trent had decreed that “no one, relying on his own judgment and distorting Sacred Scriptures according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church [or the Fathers]” endorses—“to whom it belongs to judge” the “true sense and meaning” of Scripture (Béchard, 2002: 5).

In other words, the stakes were very high in Galileo’s time in part because of rampant ecclesiastical anxiety over authority: Who was allowed to interpret Scripture, to say how the world works (or spins), and by what means? Galileo’s endorsement of Copernicanism, coupled with his occasional fervent interpretations of Scripture, fell right into those dual hazards.

There are many lessons to take home here. The most important is that natural philosophers of the time were trying to make sense of the world in which they found themselves, with the tools and theories at their disposal, and with all the historical and personal idiosyncrasies involved. The scientific method as we now know it—which can be roughly described as “observe, test, measure, formulate hypothesis, repeat”—did not exist. Certainly the aggressive, punitive Catholic Church of the time is worthy of critique, as is the fact that it took several centuries for the Church to yield an apology.

Yet sometimes lessons are learned from history. The Copernican coterie was scientifically validated in subsequent centuries. Eventually, the Church acknowledged that Galileo was not merely right about Copernicanism: He also “formulated important norms,” as John Paul II conceded, “that are indispensable for reconciling Holy Scripture and science” (Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 1979: 1466).

Geology and biology’s turn: From the fossil record to the modern synthesis

Galileo and his contemporaries had turned their eyes to the skies and reframed human understandings of cosmic positions. In contrast, British geologists and naturalists in the early 19th century looked toward the ground. By excavating fossils and topographies, they realized that the Earth was much older than previously imagined—and certainly it was more ancient than back-of-the-envelope calculations based on Scripture (a number of prominent biblical deductions put forward in the 17th century pinned the Earth’s origin at approximately 4000 BCE).

In a sense, the rise of geology enabled the emergence of the study of evolutionary biology, for as Charles Darwin crossed the Atlantic on the voyage of the Beagle (1831–1836), he read the geologists’ theories about deep, geological time. He realized that these vast scales of time could allow for species’ adaptation, change, and differentiation.

In fact, this was a major change in thinking for Darwin himself, who had previously held the then-dominant view that species were permanent and inflexible. All beings on Earth were viewed as “special creations” of God, designed perfectly for their environments in ways that reflected God’s infinite creativity.

But Darwin’s travels and his detailed investigations eventually led him to a very different conclusion. After years of study and hypothesizing, he wrote in an 1844 letter to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come … and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable” (Darwin, 1844). Darwin continued to amass evidence for his theory, but he hesitated to publish.

When Darwin eventually did publish On the Origin of Species in 1859 (spurred by Alfred Russel Wallace’s independent development of the theory), he refrained from commenting on human beings’ place in an evolutionary worldview. Instead, he simply suggested: “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (Darwin, 2009[1859]: 488). Yet major ethical and theological questions came to the fore in public discourse almost immediately after Origin of Species was published. If descent with modification by natural selection is true, then are humans in any way unique? What role does God play in creation? Are the Bible’s creation accounts simply wrong? Does religious morality based on Scripture have any traction in a world of natural processes?

Over 150 years later, such queries still dominate the discourse about religion and science in the United States. Indeed, most of my students today are surprised to learn that the Catholic Church has been relatively supportive of evolutionary theory, as religious institutions go. After several decades of fits and starts about who could teach evolution and to what extent, Pius XII decreed in 1950 that there is no inherent conflict between evolution and Catholic faith, as long as human uniqueness is maintained. A half-century later, John Paul II reiterated this position, saying that evolution is “more than merely a theory” (John Paul II, 1996). The Church now recognizes that human beings’ bodily form is the result of evolution—but it cautions that the human soul should not be viewed as an evolutionary product. Instead, the conferral of unique human souls remains an act of God—the sole instance of ongoing “special creation,” as it were.

The Catholic Church’s qualified integration of evolutionary theory is notable in its own right. But just as important is another statement John Paul II made in the same address. Drawing on the legacy of Galileo, he noted that as human knowledge develops, Scripture can be reinterpreted, because we know more than we did in previous eras. He wrote:

It is important to set proper limits to the understanding of Scripture, excluding any unseasonable interpretations … In order to mark out the limits of their own proper fields, theologians and those working on the exegesis of the Scripture need to be well informed regarding the results of the latest scientific research. (John Paul II, 1996).

This principle is echoed several times in Pope Francis’s recent encyclical.

In other words, Catholics need not read the Bible as a literal document, a historical textbook, or a scientific creed. Due in part to its principles of biblical interpretation, the overall arc of the Catholic Church’s engagement with emerging scientific knowledge is surprisingly adaptive. Of course, this is not to say that it has always been pretty, rapid, or fair. (The Modernist Crisis, in which the Church condemned many facets of the contemporary world, is a good example.)

The point is that this is an ongoing story that is not prima facie foreclosed; in some ways, it is remarkably supple. Consider how, throughout the past few centuries, the Catholic Church came to accept that planets circle the sun in ellipses; cosmological and geological time frames are vast; and species are not fixed. In affirming these advances of scientific knowledge, the Church has also acknowledged that human understandings of the world evolve—and so too must interpretations of Scripture, views of human beings’ roles in the cosmos, and even concepts of God.

The mid-20th century: A time of technological threats to global humanity

Looking back at Galileo’s telescope and Darwin’s finches from the vantage point of the 21st century, it is clear that scientific knowledge and technological prowess have advanced dramatically. The past 100 years alone saw the splitting of the atom and the specter of nuclear annihilation; the rise of quantum physics; the identification of DNA and methods of genetic manipulation; the power to fix nitrogen and amplify agriculture in attempts to feed a growing global population, and many more advances. Two major developments frame the Catholic Church’s engagement with the social implications of science during the latter half of the 20th century.

First, the amplification of technological capacities generated a massive amount of reflection within Catholic moral theology about the proper powers of the human being—in terms of the possibility of global destruction (for example, through nuclear war) and also in terms of genetic and reproductive technologies. This period saw a significant rise of many new works on the subject in the tradition of Catholic social thought, as the Church strove to assess how the rapid changes in society, technology, and economies could honor—not degrade—the dignity of the human being.

Second, Catholic social teaching’s doctrines of justice and dignity developed a global scope. Economic, social, and environmental patterns were recognized as transcending national boundaries, reforming ethical obligations for Catholics worldwide (Annett, 2015). The concepts of global solidarity and a “preferential option for the poor”—the idea that Catholics have an obligation to all people, and especially to people living in poverty—are especially important. Individual charity matters, but the fair distribution of essential resources and the remediation of unjust structures are also imperative. Thus, critiques of excessive neoconservative economic ideologies have been part of the official teachings of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Francis has given those notions a particularly rhetorical flair—referring derisively to an “economy of exclusion,” or human beings’ misplaced belief in a “deified” or “magical” market (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2014, 2015).

And from at least 1971 on, popes—as well as regional bishops’ conferences, including those in the United States—began to speak about the problem of environmental degradation, its connections to social injustice, and the myriad resulting global, political, and economic responsibilities (US Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1991, 2001). These regional reflections are cited abundantly in the pope’s recent encyclical. It is upon those testimonies, as well as mounting evidence from science and social science, that Laudato Si’ decrees: “We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental” (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015).

A new era: Ecology and planetary thinking

Drawing together insights from the legacies of cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, and the earth sciences, ecology is now a crucial term for understanding the Earth and its inhabitants. As scientists specify the dimensions of human-made changes to Earth processes, ecological theorists, theologians, philosophers, and ethicists are also delving into related questions, such as: What does it mean to be human in a more-than-human world? What are the proper capacities and boundaries of our distinctive rational, technological, and Earth-shaping capabilities? Noted environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston summed it up succinctly: We are

the one species in the history of the planet that, now in this new millennium, has more power than ever for good or evil, for justice and injustice; indeed, the one species that puts both its own well-being and that of life on Earth in jeopardy. (Rolston, 2011: xi)

It is here that we find ourselves in the fourth—and current—era of interaction between the Catholic Church and science.

Laudato Si’ is the document in which the Catholic Church officially disavows a “modern anthropocentrism” (that is, assigning overwhelming moral value to human beings, at the cost of everything else) that is characterized by technological and economic hubris. The encyclical takes aim at an entire “technocratic paradigm” and the myopic economic idealism that has allured and beguiled human beings into fundamental misunderstandings of our proper place—and proportional, ethical behaviors—in the order of creation. “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years,” writes Francis, and “caring for ecosystems demands far-sightedness, since no one looking for quick and easy profit is truly interested in their preservation” (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015).

Crucially, the encyclical also states that Christianity’s biblical interpretations have been wrong insofar as they have legitimated the wanton destruction of the Earth by humans. Consequently, Laudato Si’ calls for retrieving theological traditions and spiritual practices that facilitate healthier relationships between people and the planet. And it stipulates that biblical interpretations should adapt to scientific consensus.

In Francis’s specific disavowal of any biblical interpretations that generate an attitude of human “domination” over the natural world, I—like others—hear resonances with a 1967 article in Science magazine by historian Lynn White Jr., who challenged the moral anthropocentrism of industrial-era Christianity (White, 1967). He wrote:

What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one. (White, 1967: 1206)

Consequently, he proposed as a model “the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ: Saint Francis of Assisi” (p. 1206).

Without arguing that correlation implies causation, it is well worth noting that John Paul II named Saint Francis the patron saint of ecologists in 1979, and the current pope chose Francis as his pontifical name—while musing, in his inaugural homily, “These days we do not have a very good relationship with Creation, do we?” (Peppard, 2013). Laudato Si’ extends those suggestive musings into a sustained moral argument.

“Integral ecology” is the term Francis uses to signify the importance of rightly ordered relationships among human beings, God, and the natural world. It is a notion that melds theology and science, infusing moral values as well as pragmatic guidelines into scientific and spiritual self-understandings. For example, human beings and all of creation have an inherent dignity. Technologies and economies should be subservient to greater ends of human and ecological well-being, now and in the future. Super-industrialized nations owe a social and ecological debt to our global neighbors. The pope concludes that what is needed is a conversion and a pursuit of spiritual and ecological reformation, accountable to the best scientific consensus available. In this sense—and at a rate far more rapid than in prior eras—Laudato Si’ amplifies the Catholic Church’s ability to allow scientific knowledge to illuminate new directions for scriptural interpretation and ethical teaching.

And even as the encyclical’s emphasis is decidedly Christian, the idea of integral ecology reverberates with concepts in environmental philosophy and ecological theory (Mickey, forthcoming). These harmonies—and their dissonances—deserve sustained attention. So it is that I have found myself mulling over Aldo Leopold, that most beloved of mid-20th-century American ecological thinkers, who with great foresight pondered what it would take to establish an ecological ethic in an era of “accelerating velocity of mechanized destruction.” Leopold suggested, in a series of lectures at the University of Wisconsin, that the moral problem lies not with valuing humanity per se or even being “anthropocentric.” Instead, the problem is one of cultures that destroy things well outside of their proportion to geological time (Meine, 2010).

Leopold and Francis would concur that it is imperative to attend to ecological quandaries, and to seek effective responses, without sacrificing the language of moral values upon the altar of impartial facts or conceding to the short-term focus of a “technocratic paradigm.”

So the question, now, is not whether science and religion can coexist. The question is how scientific advancement informs theological interpretation and ethical reasoning in a world of myriad mutual dependencies. The future, of course, remains to be seen. But our era can nonetheless be viewed as a distinctive phase in the long engagement between the Catholic Church and modern science.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the McDevitt Center at Le Moyne College for the opportunity to deliver a lecture in their “Science and Religion in Modern America” series, which served as an inspiration for this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biography

Christiana Z. Peppard is assistant professor of theology, science, and ethics at Fordham University, USA, where she is also an affiliated faculty member in environmental studies and American studies. Peppard received her doctorate from Yale University, a master’s in ethics from Yale Divinity School, and a bachelor’s in human biology from Stanford University. She is an expert on contemporary ecological ethics and Catholic social thought, the author of Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and the Global Water Crisis (Orbis Books, 2014), and co-editor of Just Sustainability: Ecology, Technology, and Resource Extraction (Orbis Books, 2015). She can be found on Twitter: @profpeppard.

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