For our future's sake
03.03.2010
Pope Benedict XVI addresses the Diplomatic Corps at the Vatican.
Your Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The Church is open to everyone because, in God, she lives for others! She thus shares deeply in the fortunes of humanity, which in 2010 continues to be marked by the dramatic crisis of the global economy and consequently a serious and widespread instability.
Endangering creation
In my Encyclical Caritas in Veritate, I invited everyone to look to the deeper causes of this situation: in the last analysis, they are to be found in a current self-centred and materialistic way of thinking which fails to acknowledge the limitations inherent in every creature. Today I would like to stress that the same way of thinking also endangers creation.
For this reason I share the growing concern caused by economic and political resistance to combating the degradation of the environment. This problem was evident during the XV Session of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Copenhagen from December 7-18 last.
I trust that in the course of this year, first in Bonn and later in Mexico City, it will be possible to reach an agreement for effectively dealing with this question. The issue is all the more important in that the very future of some nations is at stake, particularly some island states.
The big picture
It is proper, however, that this concern and commitment for the environment should be situated within the larger framework of the great challenges now facing mankind. If we wish to build true peace, how can we separate, or even set at odds, the protection of the environment and the protection of human life, including the life of the unborn? It is in man’s respect for himself that his sense of responsibility for creation is shown.
As Saint Thomas Aquinas has taught, man represents all that is most noble in the universe.
The problem is a moral one
I would like to stress again that the protection of creation calls for an appropriate management of the natural resources of different countries and, in the first place, of those which are economically disadvantaged.
I think of the continent of Africa, where there is concern over the desertification of large tracts of arable land as a result of overexploitation and environmental pollution. In Africa, as elsewhere, there is a need to make political and economic decisions which ensure forms of agricultural and industrial production capable of respecting creation and satisfying the primary needs of all.
Ladies and Gentlemen, to this point I have alluded only to a few aspects of the problem of the environment. Yet the causes of the situation which is now evident to everyone are of the moral order, and the question must be faced within the framework of a great programme of education aimed at promoting an effective change of thinking and at creating new lifestyles. To carry our reflection further, we must remember that the problem of the environment is complex; one might compare it to a multifaceted prism. Creatures differ from one another and can be protected, or endangered, in different ways, as we know from daily experience.
May the light and strength of Jesus help us to respect human ecology, in the knowledge that natural ecology will likewise benefit, since the book of nature is one and indivisible.
In this way we will be able to build peace, today and for the sake of generations to come.
- Taken from L’Osservatore Romano, January 11, 2010.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)