Consequently, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith took up this concern of the pope and set
a good number of its theologians and other collaborators to work on the problem of the relation between explicit and implicit faith.
In the latter regard, H. Paul Santmire whose study
of the history
of Western attitudes toward nature is one
of the
best available, provides perspective when he writes: «The theological tradition
of the West is neither ecologically bankrupt, as some
of its popular and scholarly critics have maintained and as
numbers of its own
theologians have assumed, nor replete with immediately accessible, albeit long - forgotten ecological riches hidden everywhere in its deeper vaults, as some contemporary Christians, who are profoundly troubled by the environmental crises and other related concerns, might wistfully hope to find» (Santmire, 5).
For one thing, that most
theologians and most publishers had severely underestimated the
number of people who were willing to spend
good money on serious books about religion.