fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Rome: A Long Way from Leeville

Why the papal encyclical doesn't matter to coastal Louisiana Catholics

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjezDZY7Uhk?rel=0&w=520&h=330]

I’m not going to say anything about Pope Francis’s new encyclical on the environment until I have read the whole thing, but I want to highlight a short essay by Michael Pasquier, an LSU professor, who puts things into a certain perspective. Excerpts:

Journalists, scholars, and activists love to quote the pope and his bishops, especially when their words legitimize scientific positions on climate change. But as someone who studies religion in coastal Louisiana—one of the United States’ most Catholic enclaves and endangered environments—I can’t recall a single encounter with a person who referenced the Catholic tradition of environmental justice. And you’re unlikely to hear the three most prominent Catholic politicians in the state—Governor Bobby Jindal and Senators David Vitter and Mary Landrieu—talk about it in those terms.

Perhaps I’ve been hanging out with the wrong Catholics. Fishermen, mariners, and oilfield workers, mostly. Men, women, and children who live in a place that encompasses almost 40 percent of the marshland in the United States, and where miles and miles of that marshland disappear every year because of coastal erosion, sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, land subsidence, and oil exploration. Between 2004 and 2008—a period that saw Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike—Louisiana lost 328 square miles of wetlands. FYI: New York City is 305 square miles.

More:

Generally speaking, American Catholics are ignorant of the church’s position on the human and natural causes of climate change. In the case of endangered communities like Leeville, people are too busy trying to survive or waiting to die to care about the latest tweet out of the Vatican. No one’s counting on the pope and his bishops to save Louisiana’s coast.

Read the whole thing. I didn’t get the impression that Pasquier is putting the pope down, only highlighting how ineffective religious leadership, and religion itself, is on this issue. It’s an interesting question: Why don’t the Church’s teachings on our relationship to the natural world make a bit of difference? Is it because they aren’t known? Because nobody teaches them? Or something else?

Pasquier and a colleague, Zachary Godshall, made a documentary film, “Water Like Stone,” about what’s happening to Louisiana’s coastal communities. Thanks to the reader who sent me this information.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now