When Benedict XVI succeeded Karol Wojtyla, in April 2005, The Ecologist, a Franco-British magazine, ran the headline "Habemus papam ecologistum. It
noted that the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, a Bavarian sensitive to environmental issues, had returned to this theme forgotten. While international experts are sounding the alarm, Benedict XVI has placed ecology at the heart of the priority topics of the Catholic Church.
The Vatican wants to lead by example. The smallest state in the world aims to become carbon neutral. It is on its 44 acres of sovereignty no polluting industry, but it multiplies the effects of ad: solar panels to power the large hearing room adjoining the Basilica of St. Peter, planting a "Vatican Climate Forest" in Hungary, a "carbon sinks" of 7000 hectares.
The Pope does not succumb to a green fashion. Her problem stems primarily from theology, spirituality and morality. For Benedict XVI, the environmental issue embraces a very large dimension, that of respect for life and safeguarding the work of God's Creation. Unlike the Orthodox, who have always believed that men could come into contact with God through the Bible and nature, the Catholic Church has taken only very late in the process of ecology.
Over the past thousand years the Christian West has indeed lost his spiritual connection with nature. There is only one saint a little environmentalist: Francis of Assisi. This is an exception. Doctors of the Church remained virtually silent on the issue. The concept of reverence for creation has been almost totally lost in the eighteenth century, following Descartes, which described the man as "master and possessor of nature". Therefore, modern society no longer saw a work of God to preserve, but a medium usable by man to replace his creator. Theologians do not treated the relation of man to his environment. So that some environmental activists have been able to advance the idea that the devastation of the Earth was related to the Judeo-Christian mindset. They defended the thesis that if the man was destroying the ecosystem, it was because the Bible said it would dominate the rest of the living.
In response, John Paul II began therefore to develop a Catholic reflection on ecology. Taking these arguments, it would show that in the Bible, the fate of the man and nature are inextricably linked. In the Garden of Eden, man lived in peace with God and in harmony with its environment. After Eve had eaten the apple, the man lost a hand knowledge of God and secondly the balance with nature.
Everything distraction already. "Cursed is the ground because of you! By dint of sentences, you can get for living every day of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field, threw the couple sinner in God chasing the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3, 17-18). The fate between humans and the Earth therefore existed.
In 1985, John Paul II marked his commitment to the preservation of the environment in explaining to young people gathered in Viterbo, north of Rome, whom God had placed in the hands of man the control and management Earth, created for him, but not its possession. Subsequently, he was calling on Christians to "ecological conversion" and signed in 2002 in Venice, with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, a joint declaration for the Safeguarding of Creation, which had so little echo.
With Benedict XVI, this discourse took a different magnitude. It is certainly the destruction of the environment, but especially the genetic and embryonic. Far from the use of alternative energies, Benedict XVI insists on the very foundation of respect for God's work: that of human life from conception to natural death.
Hervé Yannou, the Vatican correspondent of the Figaro
