TRUST issues: Faith, Ecology, Natural Law
Stephen Kent who has been editor of the archdiocesan newspapers of Omaha and Seattle has a published editorial “Global Climate Change” in the Dubuque, Iowa, archdiocesan newspaper The WITNESS, 8/12/07, page 5, under the caption "Sign of the Times".
Kent is very much taken by the fact that ecology has become the leading-edge moral imperative of the times. He first calls attention to New York Times writer Thomas L. Friedman who sees fossil fuel dependency as a situation that “calls for the ethic of stewardship… Stewardship is what parents do for their kids: think about the long term so they can have a better future. Our kids will only call us the Great Generation if we rise to our challenges and become the greenest generation.” What happens in parent-child communication is faith-formation.
He then cites the book “The Assault on Reason” in which author Al Gore sees the overcoming of the carbon crisis as “a common moral purpose compelling enough to lift us above our limitations… By rising to meet the climate crisis, we will find the vision and moral authority to see all these not as political problems but as moral imperatives."
But most compellingly perhaps, from the perspective of religion, Pope Benedict XVI warns of the destruction of the world, not as one might expect from nuclear threat and waste of war, but his greater concern for the everyday abuse of nature and the gradual destruction of the world. The Pope says: “Everyone today can see that man could destroy the foundation of his existence — the earth — and therefore we can no longer simply use this earth, this reality entrusted to us, to do what we want or what appears useful and promising at the moment, but we must respect the inherent laws of creation.” He responded to a question how to educate children and inform consciences: “I would propose a combination between a secular way and a religious way, the way of faith.” The Pope made the telling observation that secular morality, stewardship, ecology, teach that some things are right and some things are wrong; their lessons lead young people to “the true voice of conscience.”
