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In the United States and elsewhere, it’s often taken for granted that the Catholic Church is a conservative institution with little engagement in the fate of the natural world. And for ample reason. Consider the biblical verse that’s slithered into modernity like a false prophet, Genesis 1:28. Here, God tells Adam and Eve: ‘Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.’ This single verse has been held accountable for creating a permission structure that’s allowed generations of humans to hunt and fish and kill and maim and pollute; to strip field and forest of vegetation, to mine, drill and frack.

Christianity is an inherently human-centred religion. In his paper ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ (1967), the historian Lynn White Jr pointed to Christianity’s culpability in our plundering of the environment. ‘Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen,’ he writes; ‘in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions,’ Christianity ‘not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.’ White casts the Church as a covert actor in the brutalisation of our planet, one that ‘bears a huge burden of guilt’. His prominence has helped this view solidify over the past half-century.

Over the same period, there’s been a notable shift – largely associated with the evangelical movement – that’s seen Christians turn inwards, increasingly fixating on their own moral arc. According to the theologian Terrence Ehrman at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, ‘Christian belief in God the Creator has been eclipsed’ by ‘belief in Jesus Christ the Redeemer’. With that comes a near-fanatical focus on sin, repentance and a striving for personal redemption. The emphasis is on the believer’s personal relationship with an empowering Christ and a quest for salvation, with all its heavenly rewards. The personal narrativising narrows the scope of the faith to the first person: a kind of bootstrap individualism interpolated into Christian doctrine. What matters to the faithful is not so much the state of the world but rather the state of their own soul.

Given this, Catholicism would appear to be the last place you’d find radical innovation that takes climate consciousness to heart. But were you to look beyond the Church’s contemporary reputation, and see the full sweep of its history, you’d uncover another version of the religion. In this form of Christianity, there’s a shimmering common thread that’s often obscured today, dedicated to radical change, valiant acts of compassion, and a solidarity with all of God’s creation.

Jesus Christ preached a radical way of living that shifted his followers’ priorities away from the strict observation of Jewish rites and rituals and towards an injunction to love both God and their neighbour ‘as thyself’. Neighbours in this usage was a universal category, including the hungry, poor, sick, and incarcerated – all the individuals scrabbling on the margins of society.

The Gospel of Matthew emphasises the primacy of this responsibility in distinguishing between those who are worthy of the kingdom of heaven and those who are not: ‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Jesus tells ‘the righteous’: ‘whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Throughout the New Testament, Jesus demonstrates a compassion and solidarity with the naked, needy, crippled, and blind, positioning those on the lowest rungs of society as the most beloved of his ministry. In the process, he set the stage for much of the radical Christian thinking that was to come.

When the plague swept the Roman Empire in the 4th century, striking large population centres like Caesarea, Romans fled to evade contamination. Evidence suggests, however, that some Christians elected to stay. The historian Eusebius of Caesarea noted how Christians ‘gave practical proof of their sympathy and humanity. All day long some of them tended to the dying and to their burial, countless numbers with no one to care for them.’ Though exhausted and withered from famine, Christians who remained in the plague-stricken city distributed bread to the sick. Before long, their deeds were hanging ‘on everyone’s lips’.

These Christians were working to bring the revolutionary spirit of Jesus Christ into the present day

When the plague resurfaced in Italy in the 14th century, a Majorcan Catholic named Roch risked his life by tending to the sick and dying in public hospitals on his pilgrimage to Rome. A century later, the Augustinian friar Martin Luther refused to leave the city of Wittenberg when the plague swept through Germany, opting to stay with his wife and tend to the infirm. ‘Those who are engaged in a spiritual ministry,’ he wrote later, must ‘remain steadfast before the peril of death,’ adding: ‘We have a plain command from Christ: “A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep …’’’

In the modern era, Christians have pioneered the care ministered in leper colonies, established thousands of mission hospitals, and set up clinics focused on maternal and neonatal health in sub-Saharan Africa. But it isn’t just the sick and dying that Catholics have historically taken up as a moral cause. The Catholic Worker Movement, founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, began as a newspaper: its mission, to let those ‘who think that there is no hope for the future, no recognition of their plight’ know that ‘there are men of God who are working not only for their spiritual, but for their material welfare.’ The Catholic Worker Movement aspired to ‘live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ.’ Day, Maurin and other Catholics affiliated with the movement established these ‘houses of hospitality’ all over the US – places where those in need could go for food, shelter and clothing. In the decades during and after the Depression, more than 100 of these houses were founded nationwide (today, there........

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