The Catholic Church has embraced a radical position on sharing the world’s resources, one that we would all do well to heed and ponder. But the real significance of Laudato Si’ is its powerful message on the centrality of ending poverty for healing the wider crises of climate change and environmental degradation.
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Japan’s Social Disintegration
Japanese sociologist and Tokyo Metropolitan University professor, Shinji Miyadai, argues that European nations progressed from the communal self-governance of food to the communal self-governance of energy after World War II. Miyadai compares Europe’s post-war developments with those of post-war Japan in his article entitled ‘Pitfalls of the Nuclear Power Reduction Movement’. His contention is simple: As opposed to Europe, Japan had actually “accelerated its dependence on the market through trade liberalization and deregulation…”
For human beings… to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life – these are sins.
— Encyclical Letter of the Holy Father Francis on Care of our Common Home, June 2015
Pope Francis’ revolutionary encyclical addresses not just climate change but the banking crisis. Interestingly, the solution to that crisis may have been modeled in the Middle Ages by Franciscan monks following the Saint from whom the Pope took his name.
Once upon a time – along about 1889 – in far-off Canada, the Federal Government enlisted the support of the three major church organizations, Catholic, Anglican and plain vanilla Protestant (later known as the United Church of Canada), in the Christian endeavor of bringing 150,000 Indian kiddies out of the darkness of their pagan life and into the joys of Christendom.
In a major environmental paper draft leaked a few days ago, Pope Francis brings attention to genetically modified organisms and the pesticides used to grow them, calling them both environmentally and socially ‘significant’ problems.
While he doesn’t call for an outright ban, and even states that they may have been helpful economically in some parts of the world, he also says that farm workers have been marginalized by the production of GM crops.
He states:
A Sri Lankan cyclist rides a bicycle past a billboard carrying the image of Pope Francis in Colombo. (source; AFP PHOTO / ISHARA S. KODIKARA).by Gaius PubliusThe pope thinks humans are causing climate change. Have we now crossed the tipping point for climate change awareness?I've written several times about various tipping points — changes beyond which there's no turning back — related to climate change.
