Church in the World

Atheism is killing Creation, says Pope

Pope Benedict XVI this week intensified his efforts to convince the world that protection of the environment is necessarily connected to protection of human dignity and must be seen in the light of a universe created and governed by God.

“The denial of God distorts the freedom of the human person, yet it also devastates Creation,” the Pope said on Monday in his annual New Year address to ambassadors accredited to the Holy See. “How can we separate or even set at odds the protection of the environment and the protection of human life, including the life of the unborn?” he asked in what he called a “rapid overview” of some of the most pressing issues around the globe.

The Pope appealed to representatives of 178 of the world’s 200 or so sovereign states to “respect human ecology, in the knowledge that natural ecology will likewise benefit, since the book of nature is one and indivisible”.

The wide-ranging speech in French, which is often called the Pope’s “state of the world address”, focused on life issues, hunger, conflicts over the control of natural resources, drugs, the arms trade, the plight of migrants and the persecution of Christians.

Pope Benedict told the envoys that the “current self-centred and materialist way of thinking” was not only at the root of the “dramatic crisis of the global economy”, but also at the heart of most of the world’s problems.

“There is so much suffering in our world, and human selfishness continues to harm Creation,” he said. The German-born Pope used the “materialistic and atheistic regimes” of twentieth-century Europe as an example of the human and environmental destruction that occurs in “an economic system lacking any reference to the truth about man”. But in a clear reference to same-sex unions, the Pope also strongly criticised “certain countries in Europe or North and South America” for present-day attacks on human nature. “One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between the sexes,” he said.

“The protection of Creation is indeed an important element of peace and justice,” the 82-year-old Pope continued. He called for “progressive disarmament” aimed at “freeing our planet from nuclear arms”. He also deplored the “production and export” of weapons that help “perpetuate conflicts and violence, as in Darfur, in Somalia or in the Democratic Republic of Congo”. And he renewed an appeal to terrorists to “abandon the path of violence and open their hearts to the joy of peace”.

Pope Benedict said it was “now evident to everyone” that the “problem of the environment” was of the “moral order” and had to “be faced within in the framework of a great programme of education aimed at promoting an effective change of thinking and at creating new lifestyles”. He said the Church, which “is open to everyone”, wanted to do its part. But he lamented that “in certain countries, mainly in the West”, there was often “scarce respect and at times hostility, if not scorn, directed towards religion and towards Christianity in particular”. He said there was an “urgent need to delineate a positive and open secularity” which allowed a public role for religions and pointedly urged Europe to “draw on the wellsprings of its Christian identity”.

The Pope also decried “violence and intolerance” against Christians in Iraq and Egypt as well as “acts of aggression” in recent months “directly aimed at the Christian minority” in Pakistan. He again appealed for peace in the Holy Land. On a positive note, the Pope said he was “gratified” that several nations had signed or were in the process of peacefully resolving border disputes. He mentioned accords between Argentina and Chile, Colombia and Ecuador, Croatia and Slovenia and one between Armenia and Turkey for the “re-establishment of diplomatic relations”.