In the custody of Creation
Message for the 16th National Day for the Custody of Creation, scheduled for September 1st. The event is part of the journey towards the 49th Social Week of Italian Catholics, which will be entitled The Planet We Hope for. Environment, work, future. #tuttoèconnesso, which will be held in Taranto in October.
edited by Michele Gatta
«The era we are living in is full of contradictions and opportunities»: this is the beginning of the message. «The road that leads to Taranto requires an additional level of involvement from everyone so that it is a path of the Church that intends to walk together and in a synodal style», write the bishops, who cite the Instrumentum laboris of the October meeting: «Climate change it continues to advance with damage that is increasingly greater and unsustainable. There is no longer time to delay: what is necessary is a true ecological transition that changes some of the basic assumptions of our development model." The CEI's analysis calls for "a transition that profoundly transforms our way of life, to achieve at many levels that ecological conversion called for by the VI chapter of Pope Francis' Encyclical Laudato si'". "It's about courageously resuming the journey, leaving behind a normality with contradictory and unsustainable elements, to seek a different way of being, animated by love for the earth and for the creatures that inhabit it", explain the bishops.
«The ecological transition presupposes a new social pact, also in Italy»: ecological transition which is both social and economic, cultural and institutional, individual and collective, but also ecumenical and interreligious. It is inspired by integral ecology and involves the different levels of social experience which are interdependent: world organizations and individual states, companies and consumers, the rich and the poor, entrepreneurs and workers, the new and old generations, the Christian Churches and Religious Confessions: "Everyone must feel involved in a common project, because we see the idea that society can improve through the exclusive pursuit of individual or group interest as a failure."
To achieve this objective, the CEI proposes, it is necessary to deepen education in responsibility, for "a new humanism that also embraces the care of the common home, involving the many subjects involved in the educational challenge". Hence the need to "profoundly rethink anthropology, overcoming forms of exclusive and self-referential anthropocentrism, to rediscover that sense of interconnection that finds expression in integral ecology, in which human ecology is united with environmental ecology".
At the same time, for the Italian bishops, it is urgent to "promote a resilient and sustainable society where the creation of economic value and job creation are pursued through policies and strategies that are attentive to exposure to environmental and health risks". The ecological transition, in other words, must be a "just transition", capable of enhancing the "good practices" that pave the way for a "transformative resilience".