This statement is not in itself particularly newsworthy.  The (Eastern Orthodox) Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople already has an impressive environmental record, as do very many Protestant leaders.

What would be newsworthy is if Catholics at the grass-roots level, especially American Catholics, accept that elevating environmental values to a position of great moral significance is fully in accord with their living the Gospel, and then start behaving along those lines.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

J.S.

Economic Illiteracy Harms The Planet! www.voicesofreason.info.

The prohibition against artificial birth control is a notorious lost cause.  And a good thing that it is, too, and that the majority of married Catholics have decided to ignore the Popes on this.  (It was Paul VI, back in the 1960s, who wrote the relevant encyclical letter, "Humanae vitae.")  Back before this evolution, when many Catholics were more conscientiously humbly obedient in everything, the anguish and stress with which married couples engaged in sex was a positively inhumane, priest-ridden affliction.

And even more noteworthy is the fact that Catholic women in this country have abortions at the same rate as the general population.

More positively, every now and again a pope says something solid and satisfying, around which most Catholics can happily gather.  But I for one do not live for those moments.

In fact, regarding the issue at hand, my attitude is pretty much the same as that of the impatient priest in the article, who believes that it is disgraceful for the Pope and the hierarchy not to include environmentalist values in the Church's official "pro-life" ethic.

Hopefully that will begin to change now.  But as they say in Mexico, that land of patient, longsuffering, disillusioned people: A ver.

To Grey Falcon: For a few centuries now, popes have generally worn white or off-white garments outside of Mass.  When they preside at Mass, however, as any other priest, they wear a chasuble (the serape-like outermost vestment) the color of which is canonically prescribed, in a manner suitable to the particular liturgical season or feast.

Red is worn on feasts of martyrs, and on Good Friday, when it presumably symbolizes blood.  It is also worn on Pentecost Sunday, the Feast of the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, when it symbolizes the fire associated with the Spirit.

Green is in fact worn during most of the year, at all Masses which are not for special feasts, between the end of Easter Season on Pentecost (this year, May 27) and the beginning of the Season of Advent on the fourth Sunday before Christmas (this year, December 2).  Traditionally, the color is associated with hope -- no, not envy, hope.  Unclear why it is, though.  It would be lovely if some clever priests will now be encouraged and inspired to re-interpret it in an environmentalist fashion.

To Jason: While I am not sure I would use the noun "extremist" of Benedict -- but then again, I might; he is not exactly representative of the best in the Catholic Christian tradition, after all -- , I entirely agree with you in deploring this favorite theme of his.  He has been making the same charge regarding secularized societies for some time now, actually.  I can only imagine that when he continues to fail to recognize the great benefits that secular, religiously neutral governments have brought to so many people in many countries, many people, in Europe and America especially, must cease to understand what he is talking about.

One wonders if he wants Europe to be brought into a new Age of Faith, following the example of Poland, governed by those conservative Catholic brothers, who have disgracefully turned a blind eye on violence committed against gays and Jews.  And the Eastern Orthodox Russians are no better in this regard.

To be sure, the French are weird in the opposite way, having a phobia about outward religious expression that verges on the paranoid.  In Poland and Russia, they ban Gay Pride parades; in France, Corpus Christi processions.

Poor Europe!  There has to be a way to strike a balance.  And ideally the Pope should find it to be part of his job to help, and not to harangue and to polarize.  So OK, yes, he is an extremist.  And his supporters, e.g. those Poles, and those Spanish opponents of same-sex marriage and in general the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, are even worse.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

To work as an ally, one does not have to like everything that the partner does. With environmental issues, there is much common ground on which we can work.

Thanks to Caniscandida for explaining some of the nuances.  The Catholic tradition is much larger than one Pope or the written doctrine.

Bart
Energy Bulletin

(As Bart says, we non-Catholics are of course free to pick and choose willy-nilly.)

grist.org

The conditions under which a pope may be said to speak "infallibly," i.e. without possibility of error, are very narrowly defined, involving tons of precedent and huge bibliographies; and the Wikipedia article is good on the subject.  It should be understood that the doctrine of papal infallibility was only put on the books in 1870 -- to the ridicule of reasonable Europeans, and the embarrassment of progressive Catholics -- , at the First Vatican Council, which is to say very very recently, like last week in the history of the Church.

And it is commonly agreed that popes have spoken infallibly only twice, both times having to do with the Virgin Mary:

1. in 1854, when the (way too complicated and pointlessly exclusionary) dogma of her Immaculate Conception was promulgated (it has to do with Saint Augustine's fevered speculations about the sinfulness of sex, specifically the kind of sex Mary's parents Saints Joachim and Ann may or may not have enjoyed, but at least you get a day off on December 8, if you go to a Catholic school);

2. in 1950, when the (much more ancient and solid and edifying) dogma of her Assumption into heaven at the end of her life was promulgated (unfortunately celebrated on August 15, so there is no school holiday, just about everybody is away on vacation, and few in the US pay much attention to it, even though it is "a matter of life and death," or at least very helpfully illustrative of those subjects).

But anyway, by no means is everything a pope says infallible.  When the Pope walks into the papal kitchen, and opens the papal refrigerator, and sniffs the ricotta, and says to the Panimanian nun staffing the kitchen, at the moment scraping out a collander that had been made to drain over-cooked spaghetti, "O Sister Lagrima Cristi del Santo Rosario, this cheese has gone bad, please get rid of it; and please ring up Salvatore, for a large pizza, half pepperoni, half mushrooms," no Catholic is at all obliged to believe that the ricotta has in fact gone bad, though the good Sister may be well advised to get rid of it anyway.

When the Pope notices the newish young Swiss Guard stationed at the door of his chambers, momentarily not wearing his helmet, and says, "You know, Rolf, you are so much better looking, now that you got rid of all those dark hairs.  But I think next time you should tell your barber to move on from Malibu Gold, to Aspen Schuss.  And leave your eyebrows black!  And knock off shaving for a day or two!  Woof!," no Catholic is at all obliged to form a certain opinion on the good looks of young Rolf, and on what color his hair may happen to be.

When the Pope, in his bedroom at night, cries out to his Swiss Guard standing outside, "O Rolfy! -- or, sorry, I mean, O young Sir Rolf! -- , it is freezing in here.  Please do bring in an extra comforter or two.  And you can leave by the door your battle-axe and your helmet, just be careful not to chip the fresco," no Catholic is at all obliged to believe that the temperature of the bedroom is in fact at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

OK, moving along ...

The much more subtle and much more important issue at hand, i.e., what will Benedict XVI's pronouncements on environmentalist values mean, really, has to do with the nature of the Pope's "authority," which should be kept totally aside from the "infallibility" business.  And that is a huge and separate issue, and a very important one in European history, and a very complex one obviously, and one that it would be imprudent (with regard to space and time) to get into in this forum.

Popes never used to be cult-figures among Catholics, you know.  It perhaps started with John XXIII, in the early 1960s, the one who summoned the reformist Second Vatican Council, who was clearly a good, holy, loving, lovable, sweet, wise, simple man.  There used to be in this country a popular image of him, walking together in heaven with JFK, hand in hand: not great art by any means, but meaningful nevertheless.

Paul VI, John's successor, and a Libra, was this-way and that-way on many things, and a polarizing figure.  On balance, I liked him, but he created a powerful reactionary faction.

Poor John Paul I was a brilliant progressive, who died just a few weeks into his papacy.  By way of affirmation, he took as his own name the names of both his predecessors.

Therefore, when the Polish successor Karol Wojtyla took as his name John Paul II, it was a brilliant piece of Church history and commentary that Father Guido Sarducci, on Saturday Night Live, should imagine him to have died quickly, and the hypothetical successor to have chosen the name of both his predecessors: Pope John Paul the First the Second the First.

The real historical JPII of course did not die, till lately; he lived on and on and on.  And however wonderful he was in some areas, his long and influential pontificate has set the Church back significantly in many areas, mostly by encouraging conservatives and their enthusiasms, crushing the creativity of liberals, and cultivating a sense of exclusivist conservativist orthodoxy.

Those Gristmill readers who also read the NYTimes may recall the recent piece on the new-founded order of the Friars of the Atonement, in the NYC area: long-bearded young fellows, no doubt very sweet, but definitely to be suspected of Talibanish tendencies.  This is a typical fruit of the JPII papacy.

Benedict XVI is more of an intellectual, less of a showman, than JPII.  Therefore, while Jason's judgment is swift, I basically agree with him in being sorely disappointed, that this man cannot allow for the chance that rational discourse may bring forth something new and good.  It is as if all the questions have already been asked, all the answers have been answered, there is a right set of answers, and he is in charge of them.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

DR's comment actually reflects the attitude of the extremely authoritarian, exclusivist JPII-Catholics.  Before they took over, things were more reasonable.

E.g., defending a pro-reproductive-rights platform in 1984, the Democratic VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro (Catholic, from Queens, in the Diocese of Brooklyn) said that Catholics had different opinions on the subject.  And that is entirely true.

But John Cardinal O'Connor (Catholic, from Philadelphia, my home town), Archbishop of New York, and a spokesman for the Catholic Church in the US, denounced her, saying that the Church has one and only one opinion on abortion, which is that it is a sin.

As much as I remember lovingly the late Cardinal O'Connor (he was a very sweet man, who really loved all New Yorkers, as best he could; and his successor, Edward Egan, is positively a cold-hearted Dickensian villain by contrast), this points to the style of the John Paul II papacy: authority, uniformity, orthodoxy, obedience, compliance count above all.

Jason Scorse probably does not appreciate how profoundly I feel the pain of the anti-intellectual infection that he refers to.  Under JPII, it was not permitted even to discuss the possibility of women being ordained as priests!  Choose: Silence, or being silenced!  And I believe that has not changed under BenXVI.

Residents of Seattle may be interested to know that there was not too long ago (1975-1991) a wonderful Archbishop of Seattle, Raymond Hunthausen, who was a progressive luminary among Catholics in the US.  Alas, in the age of JPII, conservative cranks (yes, even in Seattle, there exist conservative cranks) went whining and kvetching to the Vatican about his liberal ministry, and he got first inspected by the New Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict XVI; then he was more and more removed from authority, in an anomalous and remarkably embarrassing way.

It is a wonder, how any Catholics in the Seattle Archdiocese managed to pull through that horrendous coup.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.