Pastoring the earth

Fr. Casibjorn Quiacao, SSJV

With fatherly greetings, Pope Benedict XVI challenged all faithful in his New Year’s Day letter for the 43rd World Day of Peace, “If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation.” Sixteen days after this letter’s release he wrote another one in anticipation of World Communications Sunday (May 16, 2010), specifically addressed to priests. The theme Pope Benedict chose was: “The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word.” The significance and the relation of these two letters set the atmosphere of the Signis Asia Assembly 2010, an international meeting of social communicators and media-related apostolate from various countries in Asia held on September 20-24, 2010, in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. The Archdiocesan Social Communications Apostolate (ASCA) of Cagayan de Oro was among the few select Filipino Catholic media organizations representing the Philippines at the assembly.
This is the context of this short reflection.

For starters, while this is not an exhaustive article intended to assess our pastoral approaches concerning an issue at hand, namely, that on pertinent ecological problems vis-a-vis our parochial/archdiocesan pastoral efforts - this is a reflection aimed at an advocacy. An advocacy towards choosing a fundamental compelling pastoral consideration on the issues of environment, such a one consideration that will determine all of the other pastoral priorities we make or maybe our ministerial life as a whole.

It sounds overly monumental, but in truth, it is very simple.

1. Listening to the voice of the earth. Pope Benedict is more and more vocal of his concern about protecting the environment – so that even during his vacation in 2007 in the northern mountains of Italy in front of 400 priests, deacons and seminarians from the region, he expressed his thought with a tone of urgency – “Our Earth is talking to us and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive.” Ecojustice, or justice for the Earth, has its basis in the fundamental truth that all of the natural world, every living thing has intrinsic value, hence they ought to be given the appropriate respect and rights, including the right to be heard. Because when we remain deaf to the rumblings of the earth, it might speak to us in forms of worldwide natural cataclysm being observed now as an everyday reality.

The continual deforestation at an alarming and unsustainable pace leading to the destruction of thousands of species of flora and fauna, the ongoing careless and profligate use of these natural resources, including our lands and seas, certainly confirm our lost contact with the Divine whose being we all share in a web of unity. Understanding this vital connection, St. Paul wrote to remind us that it is in Christ, the image of the invisible God, that we live and have our being: “For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible... all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col  1:16-17).  Meaning, even the obscure bush and shrub at our very door have their beginnings in Christ and sustained in Christ.
What are the practical implications of this?

2. An effective shift in mentality. Pope Benedict considers protecting the environment a moral issue. During his annual address last January before diplomats to the Holy See from over 170 nations, the Holy Father denounced how world leaders at the Copenhagen climate change summit failed to address the issue. He decried, “How can we forget, that the struggle for access to natural resources is one of the causes of a number of conflicts in Africa, as well as a continuing threat elsewhere?” Calling for an adoption of a new lifestyle through an effective shift of mentality, the Pope in his encyclical ‘Caritas in Veritate’ (Charity in Truth) charges every Catholic to assert it in public spheres and in personal lives.
Therefore, enlightened by these, we should start examining our pastoral activities and personal choices through the lens of faith. So that while we “think globally, we act locally”, we cannot encase our parishes, archdiocese in isolation from the few sincere concerned people. Shifting paradigms demands not only inner conversion, but visible, credible examples – the organic farm in Agay-ayan, Gingoog Parish; the mangrove replanting by an NGO in Taytay, El Salvador; Fr. Roger Almonia’s efforts of preserving the last standing trees in the mountains of Anakan, and thankfully, so much more.

3. Voluntary simplicity. The preservation of the created world has now become an indispensable prerequisite in the preservation of peace and coexistence of humankind, meaning – no food, no peace. The Jewish notion of peace, Shalom – “the wholeness of right relations with the goodness of creation” – inspires us to take wholeness as the measure of life in abundance which is not essentially and primarily material. It is rather the stewardship, an extension of compassion to the entire created world, leading us to greater equity and unity. So that as we pray the Our Father and ask for ‘our daily bread’, we remember that this bread didn’t just jump onto our table but is acquired through a complicated process that has both economic and ecological implications. This is the very reason why our pastoral activities, and even food decisions at that, ought to be faith decisions. We celebrate food as sacramental, the bread and wine has come a very long way towards the table of the Lord, but nevertheless has arrived on time. We rely on this, the Lord provides - hence voluntary simplicity has become for us a pastoral value of inestimable measure. And in the end, as the Lord communicates himself to us in the simple form of the bread and wine, so shall the Earth speak to us through abundance, even satisfying our wayward curiosity. And we will journey through the fields, tread no longer upon the ordinary bush, but stand on holy ground.