The media has widely reported this week that “Pope Benedict is expected to use the national and international pulpit of his first U.S. visit as pope to challenge U.S. policy on the Iraq war, call for an end to legalized abortion, and encourage efforts to end global warming.” (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

To open his celebration of the austere green lifestyle, the pope hosted 45,000 carbon-burning pilgrims traveling from every corner of the USA Thursday in DC’s giant new Washington Nationals ballpark. Four-hundred Detroiters alone traveled to Washington for the occasion.

Europe’s press has reported that Pope Benedict is far more engaged in green issues that Pope John Paul, and last year he lectured bishops on the importance of “focusing on the needs of sustainable development.”

Nationals Park would appear to be the perfect venue for the pope’s green message. The new stadium, which opened this month, has been lauded for its green credentials – including a seal of approval from the U.S. Green Building Council. Newsweek, one of the Religious Left’s leading missionaries, christened it “baseball’s greenest stadium.”

The magazine applauds the park’s green features like high-efficiency bulbs in the field lights and low-flow toilets (actually, businesses have always practiced this kind of “green” – it used to be called “cost-saving”), as well as politically correct recycling programs and a green roof.

But what Newsweek glosses over is that Nationals Stadium exists where no stadium existed before. That is, in order to attract the Nationals franchise from Montreal in 2004, DC had to promise an entire new stadium, rather than just living with the city’s existing, old, 45,000-seat RFK stadium.

Major League baseball is in a marketing arms race to attract middle-class leisure dollars against the rest of America’s expanding sports menu. So in order to build on the 79 million conspicuous consumers who travel to ballparks every year, venues need to be built ever grander. That means (in the case of Nationals Park vs. RFK) bigger seats, more suites, nearly twice as many concession stands, and a five-fold expansion in restaurant space. And, like many public venues, Nationals Park was designed as the centerpiece of a larger development: 6,500 new housing units and three million square feet of new office space on 32 acres of land on the Anacostia River.

This is energy-intensive growth pure and simple — hardly the model for slashing emissions to 1990 levels. And it is the third brand new stadium built in DC alone in the last 15 years (and who’s to deny, say, India’s emerging middle-class similar leisure escapes?).

The idea that this is an exercise in sustainability isn’t science, it’s religion. And that is something the Pope is certainly an expert on.