Peace Through Environmental Protection

The Church has a responsibility towards creation, and she considers it her duty to exercise that responsibility in public life, in order to protect earth, water and air as gifts of God the Creator meant for everyone, and above all to save mankind from the danger of self-destruction.  From Pope Benedict XVI - Message on the World Day of Peace, January 1, 2010

Last Sunday during my homily I made mention of the Pope's New Year's address on the celebration of the World Day of Peace.  Due to time constraints I was not able to unpack the message other than to make a brief mention of it and connect it to my main point, which had to do with reaching out and making peace during the new year.

However, there is indeed a lot of unpacking and reflection that I would like to do with the Pope's address.  I feel that it is important, and if we are going to make events like the World Day of Peace effective we need to carry them into the entire year with us.  

Just for today I want to make the text available to anyone who reads my blog and invite you to reflect with me as I continue to weigh the issues of peacemaking from time to time this year.  You may read the text of the Pope's address on the World Day of Peace here. 

I found the document to be extraordinarily interesting because of my concern with both the causes of peace and environmental protection.  Also I doubt that it's all that common--at least with talk in the media--to find world peacemaking strongly connected with environmental causes.  Not expecting a discussion of environmental peace I was surprised somewhat when I read the text, but altogether I read it with a sense of great welcome.

In some senses connecting environmental concerns with peace gives us a better concrete idea of what we can do to make peace in the first place given that idea tends to be somewhat broad.  In the coming weeks I hope to explore some concrete examples of things we all can do.  

For now, let's start with the Pope's address.  I will return in the coming days--intermittent among other posts--with specific comments on sections of the address as well as ideas from other resources on how we can make a difference in providing peace and justice through protecting creation.

Comments

[CO]

I'm looking forward to it.