Saturday, October 1, 2016

Papal Notes - "INTEGRAL ECOLOGY"?

"Francis' challenging green encyclical "Laudato Si' " (subtitled "On Care for Our Common Home") was but the first major initiative of a papacy significantly dedicated to teaching us to care for both humanity and the earth - which he insists are intimately connected to each other - "integral ecology."
   
The Holy Father's next major environmental step was establishing the "World Day of Prayer for the

Care of Creation" celebrated every first day of September.
   
In this year's Sept 1 message titled "Show Mercy to our Common Home", Pope Francis highlights, along with Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, "the moral and spiritual crisis at the root of environmental problems."
   
Supported by overwhelming scientific evidence, the pontiff warns, "Global warming continues, due in part to human activity: 2015 was the warmest year on record, and 2016 will likely be warmer still. This is leading to ever more severe droughts, floods, fires, and extreme weather events. . The world's poor, though least responsible for climate change, are most vulnerable and already suffering its impact."
   
The Holy Father points us to another fact: "Human beings are deeply connected with all of creation. When we mistreat nature, we also mistreat human beings. . Let us hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor."    
In highly prophetic language, Pope Francis challenges us to personal and ecological conversion. He writes, "
As individuals, we have grown comfortable with certain lifestyles shaped by a distorted culture of prosperity and a disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary.
   
"And we are participants in a system that has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.
   
"Let us repent of the harm we are doing to our common home."

   
In "Show Mercy to our Common Home," Pope Francis then takes another major environmental step forward by adding "care for our common home" to the traditional works of mercy.
   
As a spiritual work of mercy, "care for our common home" should inspire us to have "a grateful contemplation of God's world which allows us to discover in each thing a teaching which God wishes to hand on to us," says Francis.
   
And as a corporal work of mercy, "care for our common home," should move us to exercise "simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness," and thus should lead us to actively build a better world."
CatholicOnline

QUESTION for FRANCIS:
How is it a MORAL crises at the root of perceived environmental problems?
How is it a SPRIRTUAL crises?
Morality comes from the Law & the spiritual solutions from the Gospel....speaking of the Gospel...
I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel:
Galatians 1:6
Also, notice how Francis appeals to the poor masses with rhetoric about the "poor" while appealing to upscale elites with the GREEN Religion....he has something to pull them together. His "Integral Ecology" .....beware of it...