Religious and Ethical Perspectives on the
Industrialization of Agriculture

Brother David Andrews, CSC, J.D.
Executive Director
The National Catholic Rural Life Conference
Des Moines, IA

The National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC) is a seventy-five year old organization with two concerns: good local communities and a healthy environment. NCRLC has always had a close working relationship with National Conference of Catholic Bishops, most of NCRLC's Board Presidents have been Bishops. NCRLC brings a religious and ethical perspective to issues such as manure management out of a long tradition where ethical principles focus its efforts in a moral framework.

Lower level activities such as nutrient management planning, odor control, manure storage, transportation, handling, legal and regulatory issues, economics of manure management, funding initiatives, manure management alternatives are placed within a higher context of sustainable local community life, environmental justice, economic justice, democratic values, ethical and religious considerations.

The proponents of the industrialization of agriculture as well as their critics appreciate that there are historically significant changes going forward in agriculture. The crisis of agriculture is not simply an economic crisis, it is a crisis of culture, and the crisis of culture is a crisis of character. This is the insight of Wendell Berry writing in the 1970's (Berry, 1977). Agricultural ethicist Paul Thompson, author of "The Spirit of the Soil" (Thompson, 1992) makes a similar claim in a recent speech on the topic of environmental and agricultural ethics:

"We must rethink our notions of character and integrity in light of the inescapable fact that we must make productive use of our environment in order to live at all…The sustainability of our communities and of broader nature as we know it depend upon our success." (Thompson, 1997)

Roman Catholic theology draws upon Scripture and Tradition (official church teaching in Papal Encyclicals) as primary sources for theological and ethical reflection.

During a time of political threat, in the 7^th and 8^th centuries B.C.E., the scribes gathered together the stories of Israel's heritage as a rural people—in idealized form these found expression as The Jubilee Tradition. The Jubilee Tradition was gathered to help Israel's people remember their heritage as a people in the consciousness of the possible loss of their land and their way of life. The land is a sheer gift, requiring no military or diplomatic effort on the part of Israel. The land is gift, not something to be owned or captured. It is God's original blessing.

The Jubilee Tradition expresses the notion of the Sabbath in the ecological, social, political, and religious organization of Israelite society. The Jubilee Tradition was the extension of the notion of the Sabbath—the rest of the seventh day in praise of God—to the total life of the Hebrew Community. It was a social program—a model—for the ongoing conversion of the life of an entire people. It included these following elements:

1. Leaving the soil fallow.
2. The remission of debts.
3. The return to each individual of family property.
4. The liberation of slaves

The scripture based Jubilee tradition expresses an ideal form for an agrarian people and is a model for all people's renewal in striving to live with care for creation and for community.

There was an ecological liberation, which the Jubilee Year mandated. During the sabbatical year, every seven years; and at the peak of the Jubilee (the Great Jubilee) every 7 x 7 years (50 years), the land was to lie fallow. You were not to exhaust creation. Creation was a gift from God. The land was open to anyone. No one went hungry because it was an injustice against the dignity of the human being that anyone starve. Along with care for creation, provision was made for care for the community, which included the poor and hungry. There was present and active the notion that a society of Yahweh needed solidarity, to be bonded with mutual care, social love, and to treat each other with the dignity due a priestly people. Social well being prevailed over individualistic greed.

There was to the Jubilee tradition an economic and political liberation. Those who were in debt had their debts canceled. Land which was ceded in debt had it restored to its original owner. This way, a wide distribution of land ownership was ensured. The people had learned of the dangers of highly concentrated land ownership in Egypt. All of the land was returned to its original owners so that there could not take place the disparity in wealth which an overabundance of property in the hands of a few. The Jubilee Tradition also provided that all the slaves of the society would go free. The slaves would have been collected during the fifty years—from border skirmishes and incursions. No human being was allowed to be a slave forever to another—all slaves were allowed to return to their homes so that they could reconstitute their dignity as a free people.

In Luke's Gospel, most especially, the Jubilee Tradition articulates the mission and goal of Jesus. In the synagogue, in the town of Nazareth, Jesus expresses his mission:

"[God] has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. [God] has sent me to proclaim release to captives and recovering of sight to the blind... to proclaim the acceptable year of [Yahweh.]"

This Jubilee notice fit in with Jesus' understanding of the Kingdom as similar to the prophetic understanding of the Jubilee. Jesus was the bearer of a new, in fact, a renewed vision of human, social, economic, political and ecological relationships. Earliest Christianity began as a renewal movement within Judaism.

At the heart of the Jubilee Tradition is an appreciation of agrarianism, of a balanced social order where community and creation matter more than money, efficiency, power, command and control operations. It gave attention to a society focused on fostering a culture committed to the common good, care for the land and social solidarity. The Jubilee Faith exemplifies an appreciation of the relationship between social and natural ecology. It captures well the insight: "the web of life is one."

The relationship between nature and human community is framed not only in a scriptural context but also in the teachings and principles our tradition. In an environmental statement published in 1992, Renewing the Earth, (Bishops, 1992) the American bishops refer to the connection between nature and human society as a web of life:

Catholics look to nature, to natural theology, for indications of God's existence and purpose. In elaborating a natural moral law, we look to natural processes themselves for human behavior. Above all we seek to explore links between concern for the person and for the earth, between natural and social ecology. The web of life is one.

The principles of widespread land ownership, care for community and nature, for a just economic order are all seen in the social teachings of Roman Catholic Encyclicals. An Encyclical is a pontifical address on a major moral or theological issue.

Pope Leo XIII in "Rerum Novarum," 1891 (Pope Leo XIII, 1891) pointed out the great blessings that follow from wide diffusion of land ownership. He asserted:

Men always work harder and more readily when they work on that which is their own; nay they learn to love the very soil which yields in response to the labor of their hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of the good things for themselves and those that are dear to them.

Again, Pope Pius XI in "Quadragesimo Anno" (Pope Pius XI, 1931) pleads for justice for the farmer, urging the necessity of keeping farm income in balance with that of city residents. This, he insists, is essential to the health and well being of the entire social body:

Intimately connected with this is a reasonable relationship between the prices obtained for the products of the various economic groups, agrarian, industrial, etc. Where this harmonious proportion is kept, men's economic activities combine and unite into one single organism and become members of one common body, lending each other mutual help and service. For then only will the social and economic organism be soundly established and attain its end, when it secures for all and each those goods which the wealth and resources of nature, technical achievement, and the social organization of economic affairs can give.

In 1937 the National Catholic Rural Life Conference held its fifteenth national conference in Richmond, Virginia. NCRLC reviewed the problems then current in agriculture. John La Farge, SJ, associate editor of the Catholic magazine, America, wrote:

"The crisis which the Catholic Rural Life Conference is primarily concerned, is… the problem of preserving agriculture as a way of life.[T}here is every possibility of the disappearance of farming as a way of life. It has for a great extent disappeared already, and industrialized or commercialized agriculture threatens to deal the final blow. The question then, that lies before us is: what can the Catholic Church in this country do to avert this calamity, and to preserve agriculture as a way of life?" (La Farge, 1937)

In 1937 the Conference was expressing a view which has in our own day been taken up by Paul Thompson and Wendell Berry, among others. Farming is not simply a business or a economic structure, it is a way of life, a preferred culture with preferred meanings and values. "The rescue of agriculture as a way of life is not going to be accomplished without a tremendous struggle. The forces now contending in the world and in this country are too conflicting and too powerful to admit of any other hypothesis." concluded La Farge's paper.(La Farge, 1937)

Contemporary Moral and Religious Perspectives:

Pope John Paul, II, in his encyclical "Evangelium Vitae," (Pope John Paul, II, 1995) contrasted the Gospel of Life to the "culture of death":

We are confronted by an even larger reality, which can be described as a veritable structure of sin. This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture, which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable "culture of death." This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic, and political currents which encourage the idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency....In this way a kind of "conspiracy against life" is unleashed."

The Pope is here speaking about investment enterprises, multinational organizations which do not practice corporate citizenship, that control global production, that manipulate markets, and aim at maximizing profits for a few rather than supporting people or places. This geography of greed was identified early on by Pope Pius XI, when in Quadregesimo Anno, in 1931 he said: "No less deadly and accursed (is) the internationalism of finance, whose country is where profit is."

In the statement: World Hunger—A Challenge for All: Development in Solidarity, the Pontifical Council, Cor Unum, November, 1996, World Food Summit in Rome, Italy picked up on a papal theme when it said: "There are...many large-scale "structures of sin" which deliberately steer the goods of the earth away from their true purpose, that of serving the good of all, towards private and sterile ends in a process which spreads contagiously." (Origins, 1996) The pontifical council called for "Cultures of the Common Good" which would create means of production of goods and services which have a truly social purpose and promote the common good, including nature, and which do not benefit only the private economic wealth of the few.

In a critique of industrialized agriculture, the Roman Catholic Church has been concerned to promote a type of agriculture that cares for local communities and for the defense of nature. It thus criticizes the negative health, economic, environmental, social and cultural decline associated for the past sixty years with agriculture's industrialization.

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