The Church Is Embracing Biodiversity; About Time It Stood For Theodiversity As Well

The statement, mostly reported positively in the media and welcomed as exemplary by most of the Western environmental organisations, both academic and activist, is said to have been influenced by the current Pope of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis.

That is an interesting observation.

As a way out for Christendom, White Jr zeroed in on Saint Francis of Assisi – “...possibly we should ponder the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ: Saint Francis of Assisi”.

Even today, the idea of animal souls does not sit well with Christian theology. In 2008, this writer had a personal experience of talking to a brilliant Catholic theology student who tactfully refuted the idea. He asserted, “Francis of Assisi acknowledged that non-human lives are conscious but he never said they have souls!” To White Jr himself, what Francis of Assisi presented was “a unique sort of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate, designed for the glorification of their transcendent Creator”.

Another medieval Catholic saint-mystic whose works too can play a crucial role in developing an ecological spirituality for Christendom, is Meister Eckhart (1260-1328). Eckhart’s mysticism has a striking resemblance to Hindu Vedanta. Within the Christian tradition, Eckhart can be seen in the lineage of John Scotus Erigena, a ninth-century Irish theologian and neoplatonist. Indologist Koenraad Elst crisply puts them all, Erigena, Francis of Assisi and Eckhart, as “Christian heretics who dressed it in Christian language, though the Church often saw through their un-Christian inspiration”.

This process continues well into the twentieth century also.

A principal progenitor of ecological theology in Catholicism was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a Jesuit paleontologist. He was continually hounded by the Church authorities and was repeatedly stopped from expressing his philosophical ideas or giving lectures. He was forbidden by the Church to publish what would become his most influential theological work, The Phenomenon of Man, which was published posthumously. For almost for a decade after his death, his works were censured and Catholic book houses were repeatedly warned not to sell his books.

De Chardin visited India in 1935. He had all the colonial prejudices of his time. Well aware of the freedom movement, he opined that India was not ready for self-rule. Despite his life-long suffering quest for a “cosmic religion”, his theological and colonial conditioning seemed to have introduced a veil between him and his Indic experience. King writes:

Today, Catholic theology, which aims to have a dialogue with the science of ecology, has to invoke de Chardin. A recent encyclical, ‘Laudato Si’, released by Pope Francis on 24 May 2015, which deals with climate change, biodiversity and so on, mentions de Chardin in one of its 172 references and footnotes. That is quite a recognition given that in 1963 there was a papal reprimanding the works of de Chardin.

He went on to declare:

These eco-theological movements within the Church perhaps may provide a common ground for Hindu-Christian dialogue with a shared common minimum ecological vision without any hidden agenda for proselytisation. Just as how Hindu spirituality has been a gentle, invisible guiding catalyst in the marginalised but important mystic streams within Christendom in the past centuries, it continues to be in the same way a positive influence on the margins of Christian theology even in this century. This, Hinduism has been able to do with no vast colonial surplus, institutional infrastructure and state support, all of which the Church has had in plenty.

India has been fighting a serious ecology-politics battle. It is also representing post-colonial countries in forging a way out of the climate crisis.

Yet India finds no support from the Holy See with respect to this particular charge levelled against it. On the other hand, one finds Catholic officials always condemning India or asking India to mend its ways on the issue of religious freedom.

From the very beginning of the Christian encounter in India, veneration of the tree was specifically targeted by missionaries. Jean-Antoine Dubois (1765-1848), French Catholic missionary who worked in India in the early decades of the nineteenth century, wrote:

What is astonishing is the theological continuity of this anti-ecological aversion towards Indic eco-spirituality.

In 2008, at Ranchi, Jharkhand, which is one of the epicentres of Christian proselytisation of tribal communities, the Bible Society of India was forced to withdraw the Kuduk language, one of the main tribal languages in the state. This was because the Biblical verses were translated to target the specific local widespread tree veneration of the Sarna tradition. The verse from the Hebrew Bible, which was specifically related to an old historic event in ancient Canaan and Israel, has been made to fit the proselytising context of local communities. “Destroy the trees and Sarna places of worship”, the verse read.

So, when the state government of Jharkhand recently passed a bill restricting proselytisation activities in the state with a strong tribal population, the Catholic Church, if it is truly committed to the environment, should welcome it rather than oppose it locally and in international forums. It is telling that the present Indian government, which is proactively leading post-colonised countries in the effort of global communities to preserve the planet and attain sustainable development preserving biodiversity, is also trying to preserve the local theo-diversity against the onslaught of expansionist monocultures.

It is time the Catholic Church, which is one of the West’s most dominant institutions, recognises this fact and starts the dialogue earnestly with mutual respect and with no hidden proselytisation agenda. Let the Catholic Church show its concern for biodiversity by respecting theodiversity and guide other Christian denominations as well by announcing a moratorium on its evangelical activities.