Omnia in Christo
Christopher Shannon, Ph.D.
Romano Guardini’s Catholic Environmentalism
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In July of this year, Professor Christopher Shannon attended a conference, “Jesus and Nature: Catholic Perspectives on Environmental Issues,” held in conjunction with World Youth Day 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, w. Professor Shannon presented a paper, “Nature and Culture in Catholic Environmentalism: Romano Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como.” The conference featured speakers from North America, South America, and Europe. His Eminence, Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, delivered the keynote address. The following is an excerpt of Dr. Shannon’s talk. Romano Guardini is without a doubt one of the major sources for [Pope emeritus] Benedict’s environmental thinking. Benedict has acknowledged his strong intellectual debt to Guardini, citing in particular Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy (1918) as one of the most important books of his early seminary education (as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he would publish his own Introduction to the Spirit of the Liturgy in 1999). Benedict’s environmental concerns appear surprising, even shocking, only for those unfamiliar with the rich tradition of Catholic thinking about man’s relation to nature that developed among the thinkers of the liturgical and ressourcement movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Among the works of these thinkers on this issue, Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como is perhaps the most eloquent and accessible. Born in Italy in 1885, Guardini early on moved with his family to Mainz, Germany, where his father went in search of work. Guardini underwent a crisis of faith while studying at the resolutely secular University of Munich. Continuing his studies at the University of Berlin, he survived his spiritual crisis with his faith intact and received ordination to the priesthood in 1910. Concerned to understand the secular intellectual challenges of his day and integrate the best of modern thought into the Catholic intellectual tradition, Guardini went on to earn the doctorate that would qualify him to teach in the German university system. Though he eventually received a chair in the philosophy of religion at the University of Berlin, Guardini never neglected his pastoral duties as a Catholic priest. During the 1920’s, while advancing in his career as a university professor, Guardini also served as a chaplain for Quickborn (“wellspring of life”), the national Catholic youth
association of Germany. Like many of the youth groups that sprung up across the Western world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Quickborn sought to remedy the unnatural alienation from nature experienced by youth growing up in modern industrial cities. Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como originally appeared as a series of articles in Schidgenossen, the house journal of Quickborn. Letters recounts Guardini’s experiences while visiting his mother’s ancestral home in the Lake Como district in northern Italy. Significantly, and unlike so much “environmental” thought then and now, Guardini experiences the natural beauty of Lake Como as inextricably bound up with human culture: “Everywhere it was an inhabited land, valleys and slopes dotted with hamlets and small towns. All nature had been given a new shape by us humans. . . . The lines of the roofs merged from different directions. They went through the small town set on the hillside or followed the windings of a valley. Integrated in many ways, they finally reached a climax in the belfry with its deep-toned bell.” Here Guardini rejects any notion of “pure” nature for a model of human integration with nature. Guardini does, however, distinguish between good and bad models of integration. After his lyrical portrait of ideal integration, he abruptly changes his tone: “Yet all at once, then, on the singing lines of a small town I saw the great box of a factory.” Guardini’s critique of industrialism is consistent with that of many secular thinkers, but he distinguished himself from them by insisting on the basic good of a certain human ordering of nature and connecting this proper ordering to man’s relationship to Jesus Christ. Catholics wishing to contribute an authentic witness in today’s debates about the environment will find no better starting point than Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como. A graduate of Yale, Dr. Christopher Shannon is a Professor of History at Christendom College and author of the highly acclaimed Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema. Fall 2013
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