A Roman Catholic Understanding
Creation · Integral Ecology · Stewardship · Communion
The Proposed Caldey Charter for Creation, Stewardship and the Rights of Nature can be understood within the rich tradition of Roman Catholic teaching concerning Creation and humanity's responsibilities towards the natural world.
The Charter does not suggest that Rights of Nature is itself a doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, it places Rights of Nature into dialogue with Catholic understandings of Creation, stewardship, the common good and integral ecology.
From a Catholic perspective, the natural world is more than an environment or collection of resources.
It is Creation.
The distinction is important.
Creation is received rather than invented. Its value does not depend solely upon its usefulness to humanity, because ultimately it has its origin in God.
Creation Has Value in Itself
Catholic teaching provides a strong theological basis for recognising the intrinsic value of the natural world.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that every creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection and that the interdependence of creatures is part of the order of Creation.
Human beings therefore occupy a distinctive place within Creation, but this does not give humanity unlimited authority to exploit it.
Creation is not ours in an absolute sense.
We receive it.
We inhabit it.
And we bear responsibilities towards it.
This provides an important point of dialogue with Rights of Nature.
Where Rights of Nature speaks of the intrinsic value of ecosystems and species, Catholic theology can speak of the goodness and integrity of Creation.
Laudato Si' and Our Common Home
Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home provides an especially important foundation for this discussion.
Its environmental vision is not based upon treating nature as something separate from humanity.
Instead, it emphasises interconnection.
Environmental degradation, poverty, social injustice, patterns of consumption and the loss of biodiversity cannot ultimately be treated as unrelated problems.
They belong to a single ecological and moral crisis.
This is the basis of integral ecology.
Human beings cannot flourish while the ecological communities upon which they depend are being destroyed.
Nor can care for Creation be separated from care for our neighbours, particularly the poor and vulnerable.
Everything is Connected
One of the most powerful principles emerging from Laudato Si' is that everything is connected.
This has striking parallels with the relational ontology underlying much Rights of Nature thinking.
A river cannot be understood simply as water.
It exists through relationships between rainfall, geology, soils, plants, fish, microorganisms, surrounding habitats and human communities.
A woodland similarly exists through countless relationships between trees, fungi, animals, water, soil and climate.
Human beings participate within these relationships.
From this perspective, ecological destruction is not simply the loss of individual natural resources.
It is the disruption of relationships within Creation.
From Dominion to Stewardship
The biblical language of human dominion over Creation has sometimes been interpreted as permission for unrestricted exploitation.
That is not an adequate expression of Catholic environmental teaching.
Human authority carries responsibility.
The model is therefore not domination but stewardship.
A steward receives something into their care without becoming its absolute owner.
This introduces an important principle for the Proposed Caldey Charter:
Possession does not remove responsibility.
Land may have a human owner in law while simultaneously belonging to a much larger ecological and theological order.
Saint Francis and the Community of Creation
The spirituality of St Francis of Assisi provides an especially beautiful expression of this relationship.
In the Canticle of the Creatures, Francis speaks of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water and Mother Earth.
This language does more than express affection for beautiful scenery.
It places humanity within a community of Creation.
Other creatures become fellow participants in a created order rather than merely objects available for human use.
This fraternal understanding of Creation has profound resonance with Rights of Nature.
It invites us to ask whether our responsibilities towards rivers, forests, animals and ecosystems might arise not simply because they are useful to us, but because they are our fellow creatures.
Benedictine Spirituality and Place
Caldey's monastic context adds another important dimension.
The Benedictine tradition has always attached significance to stability, community, work, prayer, hospitality and attention to place.
Monastic life is not lived abstractly.
It is lived somewhere.
Generations of prayer, cultivation, work and observation can create an intimate relationship between a religious community and its landscape.
The Benedictine principle of stability is particularly suggestive environmentally.
To remain in a place is to experience its seasons.
To know its soils.
To observe its wildlife.
To recognise its limits.
To witness both damage and regeneration.
Stability can therefore nurture the kind of attentive relationship with place that ecological guardianship requires.
Contemplation and the Living World
Catholic spirituality also offers something that environmental regulation alone cannot provide:
contemplation.
To contemplate Creation is to resist seeing everything primarily in terms of utility.
A tree need not produce timber to possess value.
A flower need not have a commercial use.
A seabird does not need to justify its existence economically.
Contemplation allows Creation simply to be.
This provides an important spiritual foundation for ecological restraint.
We protect some things not because we intend to use them, but because we recognise their goodness and their place within Creation.
Rights of Nature in Catholic Dialogue
The language of Rights of Nature should nevertheless be used carefully within a Roman Catholic framework.
Catholic social teaching traditionally speaks strongly in the language of human dignity, duties, stewardship, the common good and responsibility for Creation.
Rights of Nature approaches the question from another direction by asking whether natural entities themselves should have recognised interests or legal standing.
These approaches need not be treated as identical.
Instead, the Proposed Caldey Charter places them in dialogue.
Rights of Nature might provide a contemporary legal and civic mechanism through which some Catholic responsibilities towards Creation can be expressed.
A river's legal right to ecological integrity, for example, could be understood theologically as reinforcing humanity's responsibility not to destroy the integrity of Creation.
Guardianship as Vocation
Within this perspective, guardianship becomes more than environmental monitoring.
It can become a vocation of care.
A guardian pays attention.
A guardian notices what is being lost.
A guardian speaks for something unable to represent itself within human institutions.
A guardian also celebrates recovery and regeneration.
This resonates strongly with the idea of stewardship while avoiding the implication that the steward is the absolute master of what has been entrusted to them.
Ecological Conversion
Catholic environmental teaching ultimately calls for something deeper than improved environmental management.
Laudato Si' speaks of ecological conversion.
Such conversion involves changing not only what we do but how we understand ourselves.
We cease to imagine ourselves as isolated consumers standing outside nature.
We rediscover ourselves as creatures living among other creatures.
That transformation lies very close to the purpose of the Proposed Caldey Charter.
Caldey as a Place of Encounter
An island monastery offers a particularly powerful setting in which to explore these ideas.
Land and sea meet visibly.
Human dependence upon ecological limits is difficult to ignore.
Prayer, work, community and landscape occupy the same bounded place.
Caldey therefore offers an evocative setting in which to consider what integral ecology might look like when expressed through a particular landscape.
The Proposed Caldey Charter asks whether Creation, stewardship, contemplative spirituality, ecological science and Rights of Nature might be brought into constructive dialogue.
It does not seek to speak on behalf of the monastic community or the Roman Catholic Church.
It offers a question for reflection.
A Charter for Our Common Home
The deepest contribution of Catholic thought to Rights of Nature may ultimately be its understanding of Creation as relationship.
Humanity is neither absent from nature nor its absolute master.
We are creatures among creatures, possessing particular responsibilities because of our particular capacities.
Rights of Nature can help translate some of those responsibilities into contemporary environmental governance.
Catholic spirituality provides something equally important:
a reason to care.
CREATION · COMMUNION · STEWARDSHIP · INTEGRAL ECOLOGY · GUARDIANSHIP
To care for Creation is not simply to protect an environment outside ourselves.
It is to care for the common home of a community of Creation to which we ourselves belong.
The Proposed Caldey Charter is an independent proposal for discussion. One of the Caldey Island trustees expressed great interest in the proposal during a visit to the island, but it has not been formally adopted or endorsed by Caldey Island, Caldey Abbey, its Trustees, or the Roman Catholic Church.