Meeting new ambassadors, Pope underlines tie between ecology, morality
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Benedict XVI took his message on the moral obligation to protect human life and protect the environment directly to the representatives of eight governments in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Welcoming new ambassadors from Denmark, Uganda, Sudan, Kenya, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Finland and Latvia to the Vatican on December 17, Pope Benedict said, “The continued degradation of the environment is a direct threat to the survival of humanity and human development, and it may even directly threaten peace between individuals and peoples.”
The Pope presented each ambassador with a special message for his country and then addressed all eight ambassadors together, highlighting the Church’s concern for environmental protection, particularly as it relates to safeguarding human life and dignity, eliminating poverty and promoting peace.
“Creation is the precious gift God has given to men and women. They are its administrators and must recognise all the consequences of this responsibility,” the Pope told the group.
Pope Benedict said real progress in safeguarding creation and promoting the dignity and sacredness of human life will require a change of heart and behaviour by all people.
“Indeed, the good of the human person does not lie in the ever more rampant use and unlimited accumulation of goods – consumption and accumulation, which are reserved for the few and proposed as models for the masses,” he said.
While religions have an obligation to help their members embrace such a change of heart, he said, governments also have a role to play in promoting solidarity with the poor and ensuring a well-managed, but equal access to the goods of the earth.
In his message to Danish ambassador Hans Klingenberg, the Pope praised Denmark’s leading efforts to protect the environment, but insisted that ideologies promoting ecology are misguided if they do not recognise the central importance of the human person.
Too often, Pope Benedict said, such ideologies do not respect the God-given dignity of human life and of marriage based on the union of one man and one woman open to having children.
Addressing Alpo Rusi, Finland’s new ambassador, the Pope said the Catholic Church and other mainline religious groups are making an invaluable contribution to society when they “draw attention to certain values that are in danger of being eroded through the process of secularisation.”
The Pope said he understood how much pressure governments face from groups lobbying “in the name of tolerance for acceptance of an ever wider range of viewpoints and lifestyles, but, as I have often pointed out, the virtue of tolerance is not served by the sacrifice of truth, particularly the truth concerning the dignity of the human person.”
In his message to Francis Butagira of Uganda, the Pope expressed hopes for a final and lasting resolution of violence in the northern part of the country where the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army has been sowing terror for decades, especially by kidnapping children and forcing them to fight or to serve as sex slaves.
Concern for the continuing violence in Darfur was at the centre of the Pope’s message to Sulieman Mohamed Mustafa, the new ambassador from Sudan.
Sudan’s natural and human resources will lead to prosperity only “when the nation’s citizens live in a land where harmony and goodwill prevail on the basis of the just resolution of existing conflicts,” the Pope said.
In his messages to the ambassadors from Bangladesh and Kazakhstan, the Pope particularly highlighted the importance of interreligious dialogue and respect for religious freedom in promoting peace and assisting the weakest members of society.
“Showing a preferential love for the poor and the ailing, embracing the weak as precious in the sight of God: these are the ways by which society is infused with the breath of divine goodness that sustains the life of every creature,” he told Abdul Hannan, Bangladesh’s new ambassador to the Vatican.