Per Christum

This is a fascinating article on the Catholic Green movement from 1930-1950. Not an light read, but it offeres much food for thought.

Well before the Second Vatican Council, there were efforts being made to develop an amazing array of ideas on social thought. In my opinion, a lot of the good and orthodox efforts got hijacked by some rather outlandish ideas. From time to time, it is interesting to take a look back and see what we can about those earlier efforts. What do you think? THE GREENING OF AMERICA, CATHOLIC STYLE, 1930–1950
CHRISTOPHER HAMLIN AND JOHN T. McGREEVY

ABSTRACT
This article examines the rise and fall of the “green revolution” philosophy developed by the National Catholic Rural Life Conference in the 1930s as a distinct strain of American environmentalism. After reviewing the evolution of the approach, its maturation around 1940, and its postwar marginalization, the article focuses on three aspects of the NCRLC. First is its ideology, as a “third way,” a distributist alternative to socialism and capitalism. Second is the attempt to foster sustainable agricultural technologies by creating communitarian institutions in which the parish priest was central and by bringing an agrarian curriculum into Catholic higher education. Third is the attempt to ground this orientation toward sustainability in a distinctly Catholic nature spirituality, based on cyclicity rather than space.

SHOULD STUDENTS OF AMERICAN environmental history study John Rawe along with John Muir? Rawe, a midwestern Jesuit priest, described his vision of a “green revolution” in 1936.1 It was a profoundly different vision from the input-intensive agriculture which that term would come to signify in the 1950s and 1960s.

It is a green revolution because it is far removed from any battleground
reddened by the selfish blood of class hatred, far removed from the red rags of Communistic tyranny and the wriggling swastikas of frenzied dictatorships. It is a green revolution because it takes place out in the green fields where the land, owned by the patient, productive, profitable, democratic, free, personal laborer is blessed and gladdened with the divine benedictions of life-giving moisture and smiling sunshine. It is a green revolution because it deals with deep planting and sturdy growth and not with wanton destruction and economic ruin; because it buries its roots in the soil, broken for cultivation and divided for ownership in such a way that human nature, individual and social, can grow to a bountiful maturity in sufficient prosperity, wider freedom, wholesale family life, and a closer union with the eternal God and fellow man in religion, in the arts, in culture, in work, in the whole of life.2 1

What Rawe and coauthor Monseigneur Luigi Ligutti called “America’s Third Struggle for Freedom” will seem strikingly familiar to the modern green regionalism espoused by the farmer-essayist Wendell Berry and others in the 1960s.3 This green revolution was agrarianism with a twist. As well as arguing that the most stable and democratic social order was that based in family farming, its adherents celebrated the uniquely humanizing interaction with nature that such settled living brought in its train and they sought the sustainable technologies that such a way of living would entail.4 But their concern was less with the structural foundations of a purified democracy than with creation of a stable and Catholic American class of peasant-proprietors. Its precedents and rationales came less from Jefferson and Roman republicanism than from German and Belgian agrarianism as well as from St. Benedict, Thomas Aquinas, and various papal encyclicals.5 It was promoted by a group of social-theorist priests of whom Rawe was the most profound and visionary. Theirs was an environmentalism (using the term advisedly) of the Midwest, for (and occasionally of) farmers, of work rather than leisure. Their outlook was unapologetically anthropocentric. They used the terms “environment,” “stewardship,” and “organic,” but not quite as we use them now. The crisis that concerned them was in the first place social and structural—a crisis of a “mechanized and commercialized agriculture” resting upon a “finance capitalism” that was blind to the moral value of family and subsistence farming.6 (Read all…)

From: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/11.3/hamlin.html