The Church and the Environment?

Man is not an animal reacting simply to a set of circumstances but rather the pinnacle of visible creation, endowed with reason and will so as to judge his place in the universe and choose accordingly.

This was one key point in our semi-annual Ireland Library Lecture (though he said it much more simply, clearly and eloquently). The speaker was our very own Academic Dean, Dr. Christopher Thompson. He spoke—despite a cold—to those who attended his lecture on Preliminary Reflections on the Church and the Environment.

In one of his most poignant moments, Dr. Thompson points out that the reason the Church should not be indifferent to the stewardship of creation and, more specifically, setting aside “wilderness preserves” is that it gives us an ability to be reared in the school of faith, if only in an elementary way. Often, especially when we are growing up, some of our most profound experiences are the encounters in nature when we stop and have a privileged insight into our relationship with God and creation. Along the lines of what Servant of God Pope John Paul II suggested in his Theology of the Body, akin to the glimpse that married couples experience in their chaste marital love, in the moment of beholding the beauty of wilderness, we experience an awe, a sort of ecstasis which bespeaks the right ordering of the universe in accord with Divine Providence and hearkens back, before the Fall, to the right relationship which once existed between man, God and creation, and yet ought to exist again.

Though it is just over an hour long, it has a number of very intriguing insights for nearly anyone concerned about the environment, the future, or the church. One can listen to it here.