Response to Grant Gallicho

At Commonweal, Grant Gallicho has a post -- check it out -- that is critical of my part of the recent back-and-forth with Eduardo on climate change, etc.  He writes (among other things):

Eduardo was endorsing the fairly recent phenomenon of Vatican officials–like the pope–increasingly mentioning environmental issues such as stewardship of the earth. Is Rick arguing that the curia should pipe down? Or should they simply avoid getting their hands dirty with troublesome “specific policy proposals”?

Wouldn’t it be great if the “shift” for which Eduardo hopes was, in an integrated and thorough way, distinctively Catholic, and involved talking about stewardship, solidarity, sustainable development, *and* the importance of valuing the truly human over chemically facilitated individualism? Surely the Church has more to add than “me, too!”   

Sure it would, and no one suggested otherwise. But hooking the climate-change conversation to the contraception cart isn’t the only way to do it–or even a very good one.

I posted this comment:

For what it’s worth, the view of mine that (I think) runs through the back-and-forth between Eduardo and me is not that the “curia should pipe down” about important questions of environmental stewardship, resource use, development, etc. It is that, in speaking to these important questions, the Church (and Catholics in general) should be careful not to suggest, or to appear to suggest, that the costs and benefits of policies put forward as responses to, or prevention of, climate change are not crucially relevant to the task of deciding what should, may, or must be done. I do not think anything I wrote would justify the conclusion that I “doubt[]” that “pollution [is] bad, and not just for the environment.”

I do not think it is true that one cannot have “something worthwhile to say” if one “disagree[s] the church’s teaching against contraception.” Of course one can. I probably should have been more clear about this, or expressed myself better, but I was trying to suggest — and I think my correspondent was trying to suggest — that, wholly and apart from the “should the Church be more involved in speaking about environmental issues” question, that perhaps a *truly* “Green” worldview would be one that takes on board the moral critique of contemporary thinking about sex, fertility, reproduction, etc.