The Solution, Not the Problem

by Fr. Roger Landry - December 24, 2009

Each year the joy of Christmas is contextualized by the remembrance of those whom Christian tradition has called the Holy Innocents, the male infants two years old and younger who were slaughtered by Herod's henchmen as collateral damage in his pursuit to execute the one whom the Magi was calling the "new born king of the Jews." Herod wanted to cling on to his power so much that he ignored elemental right and wrong. He sought to eliminate what he thought was his competition but who in reality was his savior.

These same Herodian tendencies have been on display recently with regard to two issues that have been capturing the public's attention: health care reform in Washington and climate change in Copenhagen.

In Washington, we continue to see the sad spectacle of a majority of legislators' insisting that health care reform requires that our tax dollars be used to pay for others to kill their children in the womb. On December 8, the Senate voted 54-45 to reject the Nelson-Hatch-Casey Amendment, which would have banned government-appropriated funds from paying for abortion. Sixteen Catholic Senators, 15 of them Democrats, voted against the amendment, including Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Paul Kirk. This was a vote in which there was no opportunity to dissimulate about "not imposing one's morality on others," "disobeying the Constitution," "preserving the status quo" on abortion, or even "trying to preserve the hope of universal health care." This was a vote as to whether our tax dollars and other federal funds should pay for — and therefore promote and cooperate in — abortion. These 16, with 38 others, rejected that amendment so that federal money would now go to underwrite elective abortions.

The fact that the defeat occurred on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception put their betrayal of Catholic principles into greater relief. We celebrate on this feast how from the first moment of her life, Mary was preserved free from all stain of original sin, which points to the reality that from the first moment of her life, she not only had a human soul (preserved free from all blemish of sin) but was in an intimate relationship with God, who already had in mind for her a great role in the salvation of the world. Every human being is made in God's image and likeness and exists in relation to him. To destroy the image is in a sense to seek to destroy the exemplar. Why would Catholic Senators, many of whom have received a superb Catholic education, freely choose to subsidize the extermination of both image and exemplar? It appears that their consciences are more attuned to Emily's List and the infernal influences of the pro-abortion lobby than to the voice of God. It appears that, like Herod, they account the slaughter of holy innocents a small price to pay in their pursuit of other ends.

We have also seen some Herodian paradigms leading up to and flowing out of the Copenhagen summit on climate change. There is obviously a need for the world to come together to protect our environment. Should global warming be scientifically verified — based on hard data rather than dubious computer models and the spin of certain scientists whose ethical violations have recently been exposed — we also need to act, individually and corporately, to seek to remedy and repair the damage. We must make sure, however, that in our hysteria to counteract the threat of global warming, we not repeat Herod's fatal mistake, by seeking to eliminate the main solution to the problem of global warming, by falsely classifying him as the threat.

There are many neo-Malthusian environmentalists who are asserting that the principal menace to the environment is the human being. By this, they do not mean human beings who dump toxic waste into rivers, streams and ground-water supplies. They are not referring to factory owners in China who release pollutants through unfiltered smoke stacks. They are not describing those who carelessly unleash crude oil on the sea or do not prevent nuclear waste from escaping into the environs. They mean human beings who breathe. If you want to see a big polluter, they say, look in the mirror; or to see the worst environmental threats of all, visit a maternity ward.

That is what is behind a push at the Environmental Protection Agency to redefine carbon dioxide as a pollutant and then regulate it by the powers Congress has given the agency through the Clean Air Act. Once carbon dioxide, which human beings exhale, is classified as a pollutant, human beings become categorized as polluters just as much as coal-burning factories; then, just like such factories, human life can be regulated and even criminalized.

This thought probably seems outlandish to most readers, but they need to know that it does not seem outlandish to many environmentalists.

Prior to the Copenhagen Summit, a British think tank, Optimum Population Trust, launched a carbon dioxide offset scheme that encouraged summit participants to counterbalance the amount of carbon dioxide of their flight by giving $7 to a "family planning" initiative to prevent the birth of one child in an African country. The way to offset a large carbon footprint by a leader in the developed world, in other words, is to make sure there is not another set of feet in a child in the developing world. While the summit was going on, Diane Francis, a columnist for the Canada's largest newspaper, "The National Post," argued that in order to protect the environment, all nations must impose China's one-child policy. China's official government agency released a statement praising, among its other environmental "accomplishments," its draconian one-child policy as being environmentally-friendly and urging other nations to learn from its false wisdom. A United Nations Agency in its November State of the World Population 2009 Report emphasized the connection between protecting the environment and preventing the birth of human polluters so much that the Associated Press entitled its review of the Report, "UN: Fight Climate Change with Free Condoms."

Note that none of these environmentalists are claiming that the remedy to global warming would be to eliminate other carbon dioxide emitters. No one is proposing that we should slaughter the wild horses in the Midwest, cull elephants in Africa, destroy cattle herds in Brazil, or butcher kangaroos in Australia. It would violate the tenets of environmentalism to say that protecting the environment means anything other than treasuring and protecting animals, whether endangered species or not. The only species that someone gets neglected seems to be homo sapiens.

Pope Benedict has stressed that any true environmentalism cannot be built on premises that do not respect the human person. He wrote in his Message for the World Day of Peace 2010, released on December 8 during the Copenhagen Summit, that there is a connection between "human ecology" and "environmental ecology." "Our duties towards the environment," he states, "flow from our duties towards the person, considered both individually and in relation to others."

This is a development of the theme he articulated in his July encyclical "Caritas in Veritate," which has become even more relevant as some try to define human beings as polluters by nature: "If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment and damages society" (51).

This is a strong response to those environmentalists who are charging, falsely, that the cause of environmental destruction is overpopulation. Human beings, through the creative capacities God has given us, will be what saves the environment, not destroys it. Others are not our "competition," or the problem, but the solution.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.