L’approccio cattolico al problema ecologico: cenni sul magistero pontificio, le conferenze episcopali e l’attivismo sacerdotale

At the end of the 1960s, the environmental problem was beginning to become a major public concern worldwide. While Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had long reported the deadly pervasiveness of chemical pollution, works such as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb placed the emphasis on demography, then Barry Communer’s The Closing Circle and above all the Club of Rome’s authoritative report on The Limits of Development highlighted the critical links between socioeconomic dynamics and the delicate ecology of our planet. In 1967 Lynn Townsend White, a Presbyterian historian from the University of California, published his famous article in «Science» magazine entitled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” where he maintained that Judeo-Christian theology, and Christianity in Western societies in general, must bear a huge burden of guilt for the current ecological crisis mainly because it asserted man’s dominion over nature and established a radical anthropocentrism. White’s ideas initiated an extended philosophical and theological debate that moved several Christian churches and denominations toward an ecological trajectory. At the institutional level, the Catholic church was not among the first churches to rethink its tradition and pastoral in light of the environmental crisis. In many European countries it moved late and only in the 1980s it is possible to find statements signed by the national bishops’ conferences explicitly on the care of nature. This paper aims to analyze the first Italian document on environment published in 1988 by the Lombardy bishops’ conference and to track the developments of a more or less “karst” Catholic environmentalist movement, until the publication of pope Francis’ Laudato si’ in 2015. That encyclical was not only a far-reaching legitimization on a theological level, but on a pastoral one – on the level of praxis – for the Italian Catholic environmentalists that were not organized but operative and that had somehow become over time political actors in different parts of the country (such as the “Laudato si’ priests”).