Dear HCN,
Concerning Jim Robbins’
“Holy Water”: It is very good to see the Catholic Church taking
some more specific steps (in the Columbia River basin pastoral
letter) toward applying the ideas in Renewing the
Earth (HCN, 9/11/00: Excerpts from the pastoral letter
draft).
I would like to set the record straight,
however (or at least make it complete), on Lynn White’s article in
Science magazine, “The Historical Roots of Our
Ecological Crisis.” He did, indeed, claim that “Christianity bears
a huge burden of guilt” for environmental destruction. Robbins
stops here, in his quotations from White’s article – as is typical
of writers who refer to it.
But White’s argument
does not stop there. At the end of his article, he says that if the
original problem was of religious origin, so must the solution be
religious. (He, himself, was a Christian.) His solution was to
“rethink” our Christian religion in relation to nature, and he
argued that St. Francis of Assisi should be the model. “The key to
an understanding of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility
– not merely for the individual but for man as a species … With
him the ant is no longer simply a homily for the lazy, flame a sign
of the thrust of the soul toward union with God; now they are
Brother Ant and Sister Fire, praising the Creator in their own ways
as Brother Man does in his.” He closed the article by proposing
“Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.” The Northwest bishops
are, it seems, acting as Lynn White would have wanted.
John
Bliese
Lubbock,
Texas
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A cheer for the Church.
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