Catholic clerical responses to climate change and Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’

Introduction

In June 2015, Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, released his first social encyclical, which focused on moral dimensions of human–environment relationships and called all people to address environmental crises. This letter, Laudato Si’, was widely praised by many commentators for its commitment to addressing environmental crises. The writer Amitav Ghosh (2016) saw the encyclical as a key tool for shaping global climate policy due to its narratives of hope and solidarity. The Guardian called it “the most astonishing and perhaps most ambitious papal document of the past 100 years,” while Time claimed it was “poised to reshape the international conversation on climate change” (Dias, 2015; The Guardian, 2015). It received a similar reception among environmental activists, with Bill McKibben saying “Laudato Si’ stands as one of the most influential documents of recent times,” while hoping this encyclical would allow climate activists to better reach religious communities (McKibben, 2015, 2017). These commentators anticipated that Laudato Si’ would inspire the 1.2 billion Catholics around the planet to engage in environmental advocacy.

This initial reception has led scholars to inquire whether and how Laudato Si’ has helped green the Catholic Church. Several early studies demonstrated significant connections between exposure to Francis’s encyclical and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors (Meyers et al., 2017; Schuldt et al., 2017; Shin and Preston, 2019), though such results were at times influenced by prior assumptions and beliefs that raise questions about the extent of Laudato Si’’s effects (Landrum et al., 2017; Myrick and Comfort, 2019; Shin and Preston, 2019).

This paper contributes to the burgeoning social scientific study of the Catholic Church and the environment by assessing whether and how parish clergy in one diocese—the Diocese of Syracuse, N.Y.—are engaging environmental issues. It begins by discussing prior studies of U.S. Catholics and the environment before briefly summarizing Catholic papal environmental teaching. After outlining its method, this paper presents its empirical results and discusses potential impediments to further greening. It concludes that, while there is a great deal of scholarly and public hope that Laudato Si’ will radically alter Catholic environmental relationships, at least within this diocese, several substantial obstacles frustrate the realization of such change.

Conceptual framework

Theoretically, this paper draws upon the growing academic conversation surrounding the greening of religion (Konisky, 2018; Taylor, 2004, 2010). Largely originating in response to Lynn White Jr.’s (White, 1967) classic, if outdated, essay, the past two decades have seen the field rapidly grow as a study of how religious institutions, organizations, and actors influence human–environment relationships (Berry, 2016; Gould and Kearns, 2018; Hart, 2017; Jenkins et al., 2017; Rigby, 2017; Riley, 2017; Taylor et al., 2016a, 2016b).

There are several ways scholars of religion and the environment assess a religion’s environmental relationships (Grim and Tucker, 2014; Konisky, 2018; Taylor, 2007, 2010; Tucker and Grim, 2001; Veldman et al., 2014). This study follows the approach articulated by Veldman et al. (2014). Rather than highlighting exceptional cases already known to be green or querying whether a particular tradition can theoretically and/or theologically be green, Veldman et al. (2014) argue for empirically evaluating a particular religion or religious community’s various engagements with environmental issues through social scientific frameworks.

Many researchers following this approach focus on evangelical and/or fundamentalist Protestants, often finding a strong relationship between conservative Christianities and the politicization of environmental issues over the past 40 years in the United States (Callison, 2014; Carlisle and Clark, 2017; Ecklund et al., 2017; Guth et al., 1995; Haluza-DeLay, 2014; Morrison et al., 2015; Riley, 2017; Taylor et al., 2016a, 2016b; Veldman, 2019; Veldman et al., 2014; Zaleha, 2018; Zaleha and Szasz, 2015). These projects often challenge assumptions that religions are greening despite significant internal and external pressure to do so (Berry, 2016; Haluza-DeLay, 2014; Konisky, 2018; Taylor, 2004; Veldman, 2019; Veldman et al., 2014; Zaleha, 2018). Taylor et al.’s (2016b: 348, 351) extensive literature review demonstrated that religious affiliations are often—though by no means always—associated with lower environmental concern and action; whether this has changed in recent years is currently a matter of intense scholarly debate (see also Konisky, 2018). Some scholarship on religion and the environment does suggest, however, that moralistic and religious frameworks are effective at communicating climate science to religious climate skeptics and deniers and motivating action, particularly among evangelical Christians who rely heavily on nonscientific epistemologies to understand and assess human–non-human relationships (Callison, 2014: 159–161; Hulme, 2009; Smith and Howe, 2015).

Relatively few scholars, however, have followed such an approach when studying Catholicism. Binde (2001), for instance, argues that, independent of formal teachings, popular Catholicisms have long legitimated a complex and at times contradictory range of perspectives concerning the relationships between humanity, God, and nature. Other scholars have found long-standing interest in environmental concerns among both lay and ordained Catholics in the United States throughout the 20th-century, though such efforts have remained largely disconnected from mainstream environmentalism (Hamlin, 2018; Hamlin and McGreevy, 2006; Hart, 2002; Nepstad, 2019). Agliardo (2014) discusses key efforts U.S. religious orders and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have taken to establish the environment as a Catholic issue, while Schaefer (2016) highlights the work the Global Catholic Climate Movement and individual dioceses have done to raise the profile of environmental issues among Catholics (see also Nepstad, 2019). Overall, however, this research has found that, while pro-environment attitudes and behaviors are present, environmental concern nevertheless remains marginal to U.S. Catholicism, especially among white Catholics (Agliardo, 2014; Jones et al., 2014; Zaleha, 2018; Zaleha and Szasz, 2015).

Scholarly interest in Catholicism and the environment increased in earnest following Laudato Si’’s release, largely because many early commentators anticipated that local Catholics churches would quickly follow the papacy to engage in environmental advocacy (Bartosch et al., 2018; Gould and Kearns, 2018; McCallum, 2019; Mazo, 2015; Nature, 2015). Laudato Si’ is widely considered a major internal pressure for Catholicism’s greening (Ghosh, 2016; Hulme, 2015) and assessing responses to the encyclical is likely to be key for understanding how Catholics interact with the environment (Arbuckle, 2017). The central question facing social scientists interested in the greening of Catholicism is thus not whether Catholicism could be green—the answer is clearly yes—but whether and where such greening is occurring (Taylor et al., 2016b).

Recent years have seen several widely publicized examples of Catholic climate action (Archdiocese of Atlanta, 2015; Roewe, 2018, 2019a, 2019b). There has, however, been limited research into whether such anecdotes reflect widespread changes in Catholic environmental relationships. The few empirical assessments that have been conducted since Laudato Si’’s release found little immediate effect on environmental attitudes and actions, especially among conservative Catholics (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 2016; Jones et al., 2014; Li et al., 2016; Maibach et al., 2015; Taylor et al., 2016b; Vincentnathan et al., 2016). Maibach et al. (2015), for instance, found that, even with widespread media coverage, almost half of U.S. Catholics reported hearing “a little” or “none” about Francis’s encyclical in the months following its release—only 9% said they had heard “a lot.” Relatedly, the Catholic Church’s internal research arm found that Catholic awareness of Laudato Si’ had fallen during the year after its release (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 2016). Some assessments, however, have found evidence that suggests more significant shifts may be beginning (McCallum, 2019; Maibach et al., 2015). Consequently, the question of the Catholic Church’s environmental relationships remains open.

This paper responds to this broad question by assessing how one diocese’s clergy are engaging environmental issues. The remainder of this section explains why it is important to include the perspectives and actions of the parochial clergy when assessing whether and how U.S. Catholicism is greening. ¹

The Catholic Church is a deeply hierarchical institution with almost all formal authority vested in its clerical leaders (Sweeney, 2002). Within parishes these are the priests and deacons who have substantial leeway in managing parish affairs, including parish buildings and grounds, and are crucial to the day-to-day practice of Catholicism (Sweeney, 2002). These clergy also have a canonical duty to educate all people residing within their parish about Catholic thought (Sweeney, 2002). Consequently, how these clergy do (or do not) engage Catholic environmental teaching may greatly influence the greening of U.S. Catholicism. It is particularly important to attend to potential variation among clergy, especially in an institution such as the Catholic Church that operates in highly disparate and at times contradictory ways (Ives and Kidwell, 2019; Linden, 2009; Taylor et al., 2016b). ² With respect to environmental concerns and the Catholic Church, however, such internal variation remains largely unassessed (Zaleha, 2018).

Most studies of political action among U.S. Catholic clergy have focused on nonenvironmental issues (Smith, 2008; see also Wald, 1992). This work suggests that clergy can significantly influence their parishioners by framing topics as moral or religious concerns and through direct political advocacy (Smith, 2008; see also Wald, 1992). Throughout the 20th-century, there have been several instances—including especially in protests against nuclear weapons—where individual clergy in the United States sparked, grew, and led activist movements with major effects on public opinion and policy (Nepstad, 2019). However, because clerical perspectives frequently vary between parishes, far more research is needed to discern how Catholic clergy influence particular issues within their communities (Smith, 2008). This is especially the case when it comes to the environment.

Far more research has examined the influence of clergy in non-Catholic Christian denominations on environmental concerns (Lysack, 2014; Mohamad et al., 2012; Sleeth-Keppler et al., 2017; Veldman, 2019; Wardekker et al., 2009; Wisner, 2010). Such studies have found that clergy can significantly shape political perspectives and behaviors among their congregants (Djupe and Gilbert, 2003, 2009; Djupe and Olson, 2010). However, whether this occurs in any particular instance depends heavily on local factors and leadership; studying individual clerical actions is thus crucial for any assessment of a religion’s political effects (Djupe and Gilbert, 2009; Djupe and Olson, 2010). In her book examining the relationships between evangelical clergy and climate science, for example, Candis Callison (2014) found that clergy needed to “bless the facts” in order for congregants to accept them. Neither scientific argument nor scientists themselves could affect parishioner perspectives without such clerical support (Callison, 2014).

At present, whether and how U.S. Catholic clergy address environmental issues remains unclear. This paper studies this through a diocesan-wide assessment of Catholic clerical engagements with environment–society concerns. In doing so it offers a few related contributions. By revealing substantial clerical disengagement, this paper unsettles perceptions that top-down transformation will successfully green religions, even in institutions as hierarchical as the Catholic Church. This paper also demonstrates the importance of attending to geographic variance within religions when assessing their greening. Further engagement with these varied and at times contradictory geographies will allow scholars studying the greening of religion to better analyze and discuss these complex and at times contradictory processes within religious communities. Finally, this paper reveals that while Laudato Si’ tackles massive structural issues, including climate change, global capitalism, and intergenerational poverty and suffering, many clergy who participated in this study are responding to Francis’s impassioned call for change through little more than increased recycling and gardening. The ramifications of this dissonance, as well as the question of whether it can be found elsewhere, is an important direction for future research.

Catholic environmental teaching

Before delving into this paper’s empirics, it is important to provide a brief grounding in the history of Catholic environmental teaching. Though a greater priority during his reign, Francis’s teachings concerning human–environment relationships are not entirely novel but build upon a decades-long papal project (Gould and Kearns, 2018).

Catholic papal concern with the environment began increasing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. ³ John Paul II (1987, 1990, 1991) started more regularly engaging environmental concerns, critiquing the use of resources as if they were unlimited and failures to address industrial pollution. He reaffirmed that human–environment relationships always needed to advance the common good and the collective right to a safe environment (John Paul II, 1990). In doing so John Paul II (1990) called for solidarity in order to ameliorate the suffering of the poor due to pollution and unjust land distribution.

Several national bishops’ conferences also produced statements outlining their commitment to the environment (Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, 1988; Guatemalan Bishops’ Conference, 1988). This included the U.S. bishops, who in 1991 released a statement affirming the relationship between ecological destruction and poverty and the duty of all Catholics to promote sustainability and social justice. In 2001, they issued a second statement formally acknowledging the scientific consensus on climate change and the need to immediately address this crisis.

Benedict XVI expanded papal environmental concern to the degree he was named “the green pope” (Schaefer and Winright, 2013). In his only social encyclical, Benedict XVI (2009) devoted a full chapter to the intersection between poverty, development, and the environment, repeating concerns that resource exploitation severely harms the poor. He further argued that Catholics must understand human–environment relationships as intimately and inextricably intertwined with interhuman relationships (Benedict XVI, 2009: §51–52).

It was on this foundation that Laudato Si’ was written as the first papal encyclical dealing exclusively the environment. Alongside climate change, Francis (2015) discusses the scarcity of potable water, particularly among the poor: the loss of biodiversity: and the privatization of ecological and communal space amidst inefficient urbanization. He argues, following Benedict XVI (2009), “that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach” and that significant changes are needed to address these crises (Francis, 2015: §48–61).

Throughout Laudato Si’, Francis (2015) contends that contemporary ecological crises share two key causes—overconsumption driven by the search for material salvation and a technocratic economic paradigm leading people to dominate all existence for their personal benefit. Francis (2015) argues these in turn stem from a modernist anthropology that fails to appreciate humanity’s inextricable relationships with the non-human world.

In response Francis proposes an ethic of “integral ecology” closely related to sustainability and ecojustice (Francis, 2015; Rigby, 2017). Drawing on long established principles of Catholic social teaching, including the common good, the universal destination of goods, and intergenerational justice, the pope contends that all people share a duty to address contemporary environmental crises.

This is not to suggest Laudato Si’ offers nothing novel, for Francis does push papal environmental teaching in new directions. This is particularly pronounced concerning liberation theology, which was out of papal favor under Francis’s two immediate predecessors (Linden, 2009). ⁴ Laudato Si’ draws from liberation theology in several sections, including especially the preferential option for the poor and its discussion of the political economic structures causing oppression (Flores, 2018; Jenkins, 2018; Martins, 2018; Peppard, 2016). Some commentators have gone as far as suggesting that integral ecology can only be understood as a continuation of liberation theology’s rejection of traditional economic development in favor of radical structural transformation (Castillo, 2016). Similarly, Francis’s emphasis on voices from poor and indigenous communities echoes discourses of liberation he was intimately familiar with before his papacy—though whether Laudato Si’ successfully engaged such voices remains contentious (Boff and Elizondo, 1995; Jenkins, 2018; Martins, 2018).

Yet even given these new engagements with liberation theology, papal concern for the environment long predates Francis’s reign (Gould and Kearns, 2018; Peppard, 2016). Catholic leaders have for decades critiqued environmental degradation while calling for widespread action. The effects of this collective teaching, however, remain unclear. The remainder of this paper addresses this by assessing clerical engagement with environmental issues in one U.S. diocese.

Site selection and method

This study examines how clergy in one of the 210 U.S. Catholic dioceses engage environmental concerns. The Diocese of Syracuse, N.Y., covers seven counties in Central New York (Diocese of Syracuse, 2020a). Spread across 114 parishes, approximately 230,000 Catholics, roughly 20% of the region’s population, are members of the diocese (Diocese of Syracuse, 2020a; New York State Department of Labor, 2019). Its parishes encompass a mix of high-density cities, small towns, suburban sprawl, and sparsely populated rural areas. There are just under 120 priests and 75 deacons assigned to active parochial ministry throughout the diocese (Diocese of Syracuse, 2020b).

Prior to and during the study period, Syracuse’s diocesan hierarchy released very few public statements about Laudato Si’ or environmental topics. The diocesan website provided links to several different documents concerning the environment, frequently produced by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Climate Covenant. Only one—a four paragraph announcement of the encyclical’s publication in 2015—was produced by the diocese. ⁵ This announcement calls for “conversations within our own faith communities,” “to be more thoughtful about our use of natural resources,” and for Catholics to “read and reflect on the words of Pope Francis” (Cunningham, 2015). Notably, however, the diocese does not include environmental initiatives among the programs and ministries they financially support (Diocese of Syracuse, 2020c), and the diocesan-supported Catholic Charities similarly do not include environmental concerns within their mission statement (Catholic Charities, 2020).

Consequently, the Diocese of Syracuse provides a good opportunity to study whether and how parochial clergy—those, as one participant remarked, “in the trenches” of Catholic ministry—are responding to Francis’s and other Catholic leaders’ increasing focus on environmental issues. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 priests and deacons across the diocese from May to October 2018. These interviews aimed to better understand not just what clergy thought about environment–society relationships but also how clergy and their parishes engaged such concerns in practice. Each participant was heavily involved in the day-to-day practice of Catholicism throughout this diocese. Due to the diocesan hierarchy’s general disengagement with the environment, the perspectives and actions of the parish clergy may significantly shape how, in this diocese, Catholics engage the environment.

Participant recruitment occurred primarily through in-person visits both after masses and during public office hours, though occasionally telephone calls and direct emails were used. Twenty-seven priests and four deacons agreed to interviews. Other potential participants declined due to lack of interest, insecurity in their own knowledge, or unavailability, or they did not respond to initial overtures at all. Interviews lasted between 15 and 90 minutes depending upon participant responses, prior knowledge, and their schedules, and participants could choose to have the interview audio-recorded or have the interviewer take detailed notes. Fieldnotes taken before and/or after interviews were appended to transcripts to contextualize conversations. All participants were assigned a pseudonym and all references to participants in this paper are pseudonymous.

Interviews began by discussing participant’s engagements with Laudato Si’ and other Catholic environmental teaching, as well as their personal perspective on environment–society relationships. ⁶ Midway through, discussion shifted toward specific actions participants had taken (or wanted to take). I concluded interviews by asking whether participants wished to discuss or revisit any topics. They frequently accepted, and some provided, of their own volition, supplementary documents which I appended to the transcript. I transcribed and thematically coded all interviews in order to both identify patterns and exceptions concerning clerical engagement with environmental concerns. Drawing from the interview framework, I initially identified two broad categories—perspectives and concrete actions—within which subthemes, including, among others, Laudato Si’, other Catholic environmental texts, climate change, and other environmental issues, were identified and coded. It quickly became clear that one of the central patterns continuously emerging from the data was clerical disengagement. Given this, barriers to action was added as a third broad category within which themes were inductively discerned.

Before presenting this study’s results, I first want to discuss my positionality in relation to both participants and these results. I am a young, white, able-bodied, cisgendered man and a U.S. citizen with professional-class origins. Any or all of these may influence both my analysis and my relationships with participants in ways I cannot know. Two aspects of my identity, however, stand out as particularly important. I am not a Catholic, and this research does not stem from an interest in Catholic theological questions. I instead came to this project through deep concerns about the unjust ramifications of climate change and an interest in the success of efforts seeking to address such injustices. To this end, this study focuses on ascertaining whether Catholic environmental teaching is, in this diocese, inspiring environmental action among Catholic clergy and within their parishes.

Clerical engagement with environmental teaching

Barriers to action

Throughout interviews, clergy repeatedly discussed why they had not further engaged environmental concerns. These include both personal constraints (a lack of knowledge, packed daily schedules, and perceived unimportance or irrelevance) and more systemic hurdles beyond clerical control (low diocesan prioritization, parishioner resistance, low moral authority, and financial constraints). While this study cannot assess the weight of each variable, participants suggested that each can hinder their engagement with environmental issues.

The first set of hurdles manifest at the individual level, and these are the hurdles those clergy most interested in environmental concerns have largely overcome. First, many clergy have little prior knowledge about the environment. Before interviews began, clergy frequently warned me that, though they were interested in this project and concerned about environmental issues, they did not know if they had anything to contribute. A few were unsure about the validity of environmental and climate science to begin with, such as Father Harvey, who explicitly denoted climate science as an area still up for debate within the Church—even as hierarchical statements suggest otherwise (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2001). Others thought there was simply little that Catholicism could teach about the environment, saying that “teaching on the environment is probably the weakest of the seven areas [of Catholic social teaching].” Clergy are not trained to speak about environmental issues and were uncomfortable publicly discussing environmental topics. Such disengagement is not unique to Catholic clergy (Lysack, 2014; Veldman, 2019), but because low clerical knowledge is often addressed through reading (Ammerman, 2005), this study’s finding that many clergy are not even taking this first step further underscores the significance of this barrier. ¹¹

Others did not engage environmental concerns due to their already hectic and over-packed schedules. With little time or energy left to themselves, clergy are often unable to take on new tasks. Father Gert, though an avid reader of nature magazines and self-identified environmentalist, said when reflecting on his engagement that “I’ve been so busy in the last few years trying to keep my head above water, I could not say I’d like to have it come up more.” Deacon Arthur thought similarly, saying “I haven’t—I don’t want to say put a lot of thought or effort into [Laudato Si’] because I’ve been consumed by daily activities.” This study is not the first to find that Catholic clergy are exhausted by their day-to-day responsibilities (Conway, 2011; Fichter, 1987; Kane, 2017; McDevitt, 2010; Pietkiewicz, 2016), yet it is important to understand that such pressures, particularly as they increase concurrent with declining numbers of active clergy, hinder Catholic parochial clergy’s ability to green Catholicism.

This itself, however, raises questions as to why environmental issues fall outside these hectic schedules. In large part this stems from clergy’s personal priorities. Father Richard thought the destruction of traditional family life was the root of all other ills, contending that if this was addressed, other crises (including the environment) would be fixed. Alternatively, Father Phillippe prioritized critiquing U.S. immigration policies. Though he had not read Laudato Si’, Phillippe hoped he would soon, but something always appeared more pressing than the environment. This reinforces findings from risk perception research that the environment is often considered a low priority (Leiserowitz, 2006; Pidgeon, 2012), itself compounded by a lack of underlying knowledge (Lee et al., 2015). Though Francis (2015) repeatedly emphasizes that climate change must be addressed immediately, his impassioned call has not effectively overcome the environment’s perceived unimportance.

Frequently this was because clergy did not think environmental concerns were relevant to their communities, even when thinking the broader Church should do more. Six participants explicitly mentioned that they thought Catholic environmental teaching was more relevant to rural parishes and thought Laudato Si’ mattered little for urban communities. This too stems from low knowledge concerning nature–society relationships, reproducing long-critiqued yet widely prevalent urban–rural and urban–nature binaries (Cronon, 1991; Rickards et al., 2016; Williams, 1973). This in turn led several clergy to consider climate change and other environmental issues as a rural problem not applicable to many parishes. They thought non-rural parishioners would have little interest in environmental topics and did not expect success in engaging these issues.

This first set of barriers—low knowledge, perceived unimportance or irrelevance, and already packed schedules—are important reasons why many participants have not incorporated environmental concerns into their work. However, even when clergy successfully overcome such hurdles, as several have, their parishes remain far from as green as they would like. Parish education programs only engage limited subsets of the parish and subsequent dialogs are limited. Fossil fuel use is still prevalent. Efforts to reduce ecological impacts are focused on recycling and reducing plastic waste, and engagements with broader environmental science or politics are almost non-existent. This suggests a second set of barriers to action, many of which may be difficult, if not impossible, for clergy to overcome alone.

Central among these structural barriers were widespread perceptions that diocesan leadership was uninterested in environmental issues. While clerical life is often framed as a vocational calling and not a career, it nevertheless involves reviews, promotions, preferred work assignments, supervisors, and centralized authoritative bureaucracy. Given this, clerical impressions of diocesan priorities (and topics best avoided) can be central to their ministry, particularly if they have higher ambitions (Lysack, 2014). Many participants—though not all—shared an impression that environmental issues were unimportant to the diocese.

Consequently, those clergy seeking professional advancement had little need to engage environmental issues. While some pressure emanates from the Vatican concerning the importance of Catholic environmental teaching, it largely dissipates before reaching the parochial clergy. Though some participants mentioned that diocesan officials had relayed instructions and suggestions for preaching about the environment, several others could not recall hearing anything from the diocese. Moreover, only one priest—Father Paul—said that these suggestions led him to preach about environmental concerns. Father Nicholas anticipated this disengagement, attributing it to “bishop fatigue” while remarking that over the last few decades clergy have been overwhelmed by hierarchical directives. Nicholas suggested that as a result many older clergy simply choose to ignore the hierarchy altogether within their ministry.

Additionally, this perceived diocesan disinterest made it more difficult for clergy to overcome the individual barriers to action. Father Sebastian thought that because the diocese did not appear to have publicly embraced Catholic environmental teaching, he would have difficulty convincing his parishioners that environmental issues were relevant to Catholicism. Sebastian hoped a stronger diocesan emphasis on creation care would provide him more leeway to raise these issues. Parishioners, he hoped, would see this joint focus and understand that this was not Sebastian’s project alone. Without this support, however, he expected parishioners to simply brush off his efforts.

Several other clergy thought that, beyond disinterest, parishioners would actively resist any attempt to incorporate environmental issues into their ministry. Several expected or had already encountered parishioner resistance when raising environmental issues. This happened to Father Don when, the day after putting environmental inserts into the bulletin, a parishioner complained that he was supporting left-wing propaganda with no place in church. Father Otto had similarly been accosted after mass the sole time he preached on climate change. Others who mentioned climate change’s potential divisiveness anticipated similar reactions. Father Van, for instance, thought parishioners would accuse him of “making things up” and bringing personal politics into the pulpit, even if he framed them entirely as moral and religious concerns supported by papal teaching. While clergy consistently said this politicization would not dissuade them, they nevertheless mentioned it as a potential hurdle and, perhaps tellingly, have generally not discussed environmental issues with parishioners they expect to be unsympathetic. ¹²

Though not anticipating that parishioners would reject environmental action on political grounds, Father Alex thought that other factors might dissuade parishioner engagement. Alex expected parishioners to hesitate when asked

to change the space they’ve grown in, and there’s a very deep emotional attachment to the places people have had their baptisms, weddings and funerals. They don’t want to change the way it looks because it gives them a sense of comfort, a sense of home.

Moreover, Father Alex felt neither he nor his colleagues in Europe and North America had the moral authority to inspire such change. Due to widespread child sexual abuse and subsequent cover-ups throughout the Catholic Church, Alex thought that no one would listen to him. ¹³ He hoped clergy could eventually rebuild trust by foregrounding “the Church in the South,” but he expected many parishioners would simply ignore Catholic clergy who attempted to speak as moral authorities. Though deeply concerned about environmental issues—we discussed topics ranging from whether to have children in a world devastated by climate change to strip mining and heavy metals extraction—Alex felt largely unable to affect his parishioners’ morality. Several other participants similarly expected parishioners to tune them out as most attended mass solely to fulfill religious obligations—clergy could say whatever they wished, but most parishioners would ignore them.

The final key structural barrier are financial constraints. Lysack (2014) discusses how limited finances have required staffing cuts across religious institutions at the national level, and it is important to understand how such constraints also effect local churches (Ammerman, 1997). Routine maintenance and obligations to support other diocesan activities mean that individual parishes have limited resources for additional programming, let alone for the renovations required to physically green church buildings. Without access to financial support, clergy are severely limited in what they can actually do, regardless of how much they want to address environmental issues.

Read together, this myriad of mutually reinforcing barriers appears to substantially inhibit clerical engagement with environmental issues in the Diocese of Syracuse. While assessing how these hurdles may be overcome is beyond the scope of this paper, each presents an important obstacle to greening Catholic churches.

Conclusion

This paper has assessed how Catholic clergy in the Diocese of Syracuse, N.Y., have engaged environmental issues by drawing on interviews with 31 parochial clergy. I began by contextualizing this study within the literature concerning the greening of Catholicism in the United States before briefly reviewing Catholic papal teaching on the environment. After discussing my methods, I presented this study’s empirical results. Divided into three sections (perspectives, actions, and barriers), these results suggest that, while clergy in this diocese have begun discursively engaging Laudato Si’ and other Catholic environmental teaching, few have taken concrete steps in response. There are a few exceptions, parishes that have begun incorporating concern for the environment into their daily operations, but these are quite uncommon. While clergy expressed an interest in changing this and more robustly addressing environmental concerns, due to several interlocking barriers, at present many remain unable to do so.

These findings offer several important lessons for scholars studying the relationships between Catholicism and the environment. First, this project expands upon Lysack’s (2014) study to suggest several additional barriers to further green Catholicism, including especially a lack of knowledge concerning environmental and diminished moral authority that together contributed to clerical self-perceptions that their environmental advocacy would be largely ineffective. This project also suggests four general levels of clerical engagement with environmental issues. Further research into the prevalence of these levels, as well as the existence and prevalence of other forms of clerical engagement, can expand understanding of clerical activity and inter-clerical variance concerning environmental issues.

More broadly, despite clear reasons why religious and/or moral narratives may appear more effective at spurring movements to address climate change and other environmental crises (Ghosh, 2016; Hulme, 2009; Smith and Howe, 2015), this study underscores the importance of empirically assessing whether and how such narratives are engaged. Even a document such as Laudato Si’ is unable to spur change when left unread on a shelf. Given that many clergy want to better engage environmental issues but do not know how, this study also suggests that there may be potential opportunities for future collaborative research and teaching between scholars and clergy.

Finally, even in parishes where sustained engagement with Laudato Si’ is occurring, such efforts are far from those Francis urges. Francis (2015: §106–113, 172–175) repeatedly calls for an entirely new way of understanding human relationships with the non-human world and structural transformations to reverse climate change and eliminate poverty across the planet. Participants in this study by and large responded by setting up recycling programs, incorporating environmental asides into their preaching and hymns, and setting up gardens. Some go further, attempting to educate their communities about environmental relationships and ensure that people have access to fresh food. Such efforts are moves toward integral ecology, but they are only initial steps and remain far from the “radical change which present circumstances require” (Francis, 2015: §171). While clergy are limited in what they can each individually accomplish, in this diocese Francis’s call and clerical responses nevertheless remain quite dissonant.

As with any study, these results have limitations. This study has assessed Catholic clergy within only one diocese, and research in other dioceses is needed to better understand how clergy elsewhere are involved in greening the Catholic Church. Similarly, this research was conducted only a few years after Laudato Si’ was released, and it may take more time for its effects to be fully realized. Consequently, while this study provides a baseline for the encyclical’s immediate effect among clergy in the Diocese of Syracuse, additional research is needed to understand whether, how, and why this changes in the years to come.

Further research also is needed to evaluate how other groups within the Catholic Church—religious orders, Catholic universities and seminaries, hospitals, and the laity—have engaged Laudato Si’ and other Catholic environmental texts. Along the lines of Taylor’s (2007) Green Sisters, this work can ascertain the differences in whether and how Catholicism greens within these communities. Doing so will provide the groundwork for more comprehensively assessing how the Catholic Church in the United States and around the world engages and shapes relationships between humans and the world beyond.

Highlights

Thirty-one interviews with parochial clergy in one Catholic diocese revealed that many clergy are not engaging Catholic environmental teaching