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Views from the Choir Loft

On the Spirit of Conservation

Fr. David Friel · August 28, 2016

NE OF MY GREAT LOVES is the National Parks. To be sure, this love falls somewhere after my love for God, Mary, the saints, my family, my vocation, etc. But my love for these magnificent places is nevertheless quite real.

This past week, the United States marked 100 years since the formal establishment of the National Park Service by President Woodrow Wilson (although the multi-layered history of the parks actually goes back to 1872, when Yellowstone was set aside as a public reservation). This seems an opportune moment to praise the spirit of conservation and to consider briefly the Christian duty to admire the natural beauty of creation.

I’m a new resident of Washington, D.C., and just yesterday I took a walk along “America’s Front Yard,” the National Mall, which is the most visited of the National Parks. I’m fortunate to have seen the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Zion, and many other of our National Parks (the above photograph is from my visit to Bryce Canyon NP). Traveling through our nation’s parks is not unlike the experience of visiting cathedrals in different cities; one finds that each park, like each church, is beautiful in a unique way. Each of these places communicates to us something of the divine, and we always emerge the better for having visited.

Sacred architecture is a very worthwhile discipline. Using our human ingenuity to build houses for God that reflect His magnificence is a holy enterprise. This does not detract, however, from the richness to be found in the beauty of wilderness. The National Parks are special sanctuaries not made by human hands. Their subtlety, splendor, and variety inspire the creative mind. Why do we not build cookie-cutter churches? For much the same reason that God did not build cookie-cutter forests and rivers and rock faces and galaxies.

In the act he signed to establish the National Park Service, President Wilson stipulated that the parks were intended not only for the enjoyment of those presently living. They were to be cared for, rather, “in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” There is great nobility in this project of preservation. It places the treasures of our land in the possession of the whole people, not in the hands of individuals.

The natural wonders found in the territories of the United States are worth protecting. This spirit of conservation, of course, must similarly be applied to the world’s great works of art: literature, music, sculpture, painting, architecture. This spirit, sadly, has been too often violated by “renovations” and “reforms” that have done damage to what should have been preserved. The treasures of our Catholic heritage—including beautiful churches, works of art, and the corpus of sacred music—have sometimes been wrested from the hands of the whole people, to whom they rightly belong. When this has happened, these treasures invariably did not receive the proper care due them. From the iconoclasts of the early centuries to the iconoclasts of the Protestant Reformation to the iconoclasts of the post-conciliar period, Catholics have learned again and again that the preservation of our patrimony is fragile.

In May 2015, the Holy Father released an encyclical (Laudato Si) on the topic of the environment. Among many other things, the text calls for renewed dedication to the work of conservation. This is expressed beautifully in the document’s concluding prayer:

All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe and in the smallest of your creatures. You embrace with your tenderness all that exists. Pour out upon us the power of your love, that we may protect life and beauty. Bring healing to our lives, that we may protect the world and not prey on it, that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.

Debate will and should continue about a variety of ecological concerns addressed by the encyclical. In many cases, reasonable minds can differ about specific ways in which we should exercise stewardship over the earth. What should remain unquestioned, however, is the foundational principle that creation deserves to be appreciated and conserved. The Lord’s primeval command to “subdue” the Earth is not, after all, a command to “destroy” it, or even to “neglect” it.

It mystifies me that speaking positively about conservation and similar matters makes some traditional Catholics uncomfortable. To these individuals, I point out that it was Pope Benedict who earned the moniker, the “Green Pope” (see Newsweek and National Geographic).

A healthy love for our environment in no way denigrates our higher obligations to our fellow man. Certainly, caring for the unborn and the elderly and those in between is far more important than saving endangered species of animals and plants. But saving endangered species is not unimportant. The work of conservation should not be regarded as simply the penchant of tree-hugging hippies; rather, “care for our common home” is fundamental to the Christian understanding of the cosmos.

Indeed, what we do to care for God’s creation is not disconnected from the work of inter-personal charity. “Concern for the environment . . . needs to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society” (Pope Francis, Laudato Si, #91).

The father of modern conservation and the godfather, so to speak, of the National Parks was the naturalist John Muir. Throughout a lifetime spent enjoying and defending the American wilderness, Muir always contended that conservationism has spiritual underpinnings. As he once wrote:

Everybody needs beauty . . . places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike. (John Muir)

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Beauty, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, Sacred Architecture Last Updated: January 1, 2020

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About Fr. David Friel

Ordained in 2011, Father Friel is a priest of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and serves as Director of Liturgy at Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary. —(Read full biography).

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Corpus Christi Watershed

President’s Corner

    “Yahweh” in church songs?
    My pastor asked me to write a weekly column for our parish bulletin. The one scheduled to run on 22 June 2025 is called “Three Words in a Psalm” and speaks of translating the TETRAGRAMMATON. You can read the article at this column repository. All of them are quite brief because I was asked to keep within a certain word limit.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
    Some have expressed interest in perusing the ORDER OF MUSIC I prepared for Pentecost Sunday (8 June 2025). If such a thing interests you, feel free to download it as a PDF file. Because our choir is on break this week, the music is relatively simple.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Truly Great Processional” • (Pipe Organ)
    I stumbled upon this live recording of a PROCESSIONAL I played on the pipe organ in 2002. It’s an excerpt from a much longer composition by Sebastian Bach. In those days, there weren’t sophisticated recording devices allowing one “fix” wrong notes. (Perhaps they existed, but we didn’t have machines like that.) So it was necessary to play the entire piece from beginning to end. If you’re a church organist, feel free to download the PDF score. I suppose it’s only a matter of time until some joker uses “artificial intelligence” to play music at church … but there’s something so satisfying about playing an organ in real life.
    —Jeff Ostrowski

Quick Thoughts

    Antiphons Don’t Match?
    A reader wants to know why the Entrance and Communion antiphons in certain publications deviate from what’s prescribed by the GRADUALE ROMANUM published after Vatican II. Click here to read our answer. The short answer is: the Adalbert Propers were never intended to be sung. They were intended for private Masses only (or Masses without music). The “Graduale Parvum,” published by the John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music in 2023, mostly uses the Adalbert Propers—but sometimes uses the GRADUALE text: e.g. Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June).
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    When to Sit, Stand and Kneel like it’s 1962
    There are lots of different guides to postures for Mass, but I couldn’t find one which matched our local Latin Mass, so I made this one: sit-stand-kneel-crop
    —Veronica Brandt
    The Funeral Rites of the Graduale Romanum
    Lately I have been paging through the 1974 Graduale Romanum (see p. 678 ff.) and have been fascinated by the funeral rites found therein, especially the simply-beautiful Psalmody that is appointed for all the different occasions before and after the funeral Mass: at the vigil/wake, at the house of the deceased, processing to the church, at the church, processing to the cemetery, and at the cemetery. Would that this “stational Psalmody” of the Novus Ordo funeral rites saw wider usage! If you or anyone you know have ever used it, please do let me know.
    —Daniel Tucker

Random Quote

Giovanni Doni is known for having changed the name of note “Ut,” renaming it “Do.” He convinced his contemporaries to make the change by arguing that 1) “Do” is easier to pronounce than “Ut,” and 2) “Do” is an abbreviation for “Dominus,” the Latin word for the Lord, Who is the tonic and root of the world. There is much academic speculation that Giovanni Doni also wanted to imprint himself into musical canon in perpetuity because “Do” is also ulteriorly an abbreviation for his family name.

— Giovanni Battista Doni died in 1647AD

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