If people do not see themselves as “caretakers of the garden of creation, we end up becoming its destroyers”, Pope Leo XIV said yesterday. Source: CNS.
As the UN Climate Conference continued in Brazil, the Pope dedicated his weekly general audience talk to explaining how Jesus’s death and resurrection should lead Christians to “a spirituality of integral ecology”, which seeks the good of the human person and the planet.
Believing in Christ does not isolate Christians from the world and its concerns, the Pope said, but rather it motivates them to share with others how faith generates hope and action, including the kind of conversion needed to provide greater care for the poor and for the earth.
Without concrete commitments, he said, “the words of faith have no hold on reality, and the words of science remain outside the heart.”
“If we allow it, Christ’s salvific act can transform all our relationships: with God, with other people and with creation,” Pope Leo said in his English-language remarks.
Christians “must allow the seed of Christian hope to bear fruit, convert our hearts and influence the ways we respond to the issues that we face,” including the pressing issue of climate change and, particularly, its impact on the world’s poorest people.
“As followers of Jesus,” he said, “we are called to promote lifestyles and policies that focus on the protection of human dignity and of all of creation.”
“Christian hope responds to the demands of our time regarding the climate and the environment,” he told Portuguese speakers.
Pope Leo encouraged people in the audience to “invoke the Spirit to help us care, with the same faith, for our common home and for our hearts”.
FULL STORY
Believers must care for the poor and creation, Pope says (CNS)
